In the poem Lament the poet is talking about war and other disasters, created by man, which destroys

the world. She is talking about how the animals are affected and she uses them as a device for empathy from the reader. Even in the title she is starting with a gloomy picture. Lament means the expression of sorrow or regret. By not using a well known word such as regret she is creating a sense of mystery and importance over the poem. In the line For the cormorant in his funeral silk, she is talking about death, where she creates the image of funeral, being black, and silk, being oil. It is well known that thousand of birds die each year because of the oil leaked into the ocean. Using oil as the murder weapon she is putting the blame on mankind, seeing us as the killer. This makes the reader feel guilty, and while putting a sense of guilt on our mind she raises the understanding of the problem we are creating.For oceans lap with its mortal stain, is a dark, terrifying picture, created by the poet to create disgust for what we have done. By saying mortal stain she is again referring to the travelling oil, carried by the ocean, swallowing every bit of life in its path.In the line the long migrations and the slow dying, the veiled sun and the stink of anger, Clarke is showing that even though it is us humans who are the reason for war and oil leaks, we are also the victims. She is saying that you cannot generalize humans as one entity, that we all are different with individual opinions. And even though not everybody is to blame for wars and global warming, we can all do something to help. In the poem Clarke is repeating the word for in front of many lines. This raises the question What is it for? and this makes the reader think a lot more about the meaning of the poem. An example is For vengeance, and the ashes of language which is the last line of the poem. Here the poet is putting the idea of people who want revenge and the ashes of language might be the metaphor for language being the start of war and how war is the fire and when its over, all that is left is its ashes. This is a gloomy picture, but when we think about how in the old days people used the ashes to grow their farmland and this makes us think that we can rise from the ashes. All in all what Clarke is saying is that even though we have some world wide problems, created by us, hope is not lost. We can still do something about it and save our planet.

For Gillian Clarke's poem "Lament," the stanzas shown use imagery and metaphors to describe the realities of what occurred in the Gulf War. (Poetry is very subjective, speaking to different people in different ways. These are my perceptions only.) "For the ocean's lap with its mortal stain" refers to the blood of those killed that fills the water. (See note below.) Gillian Clarke comments on her poem in the following lines:

Lament is an elegy, an expression of grief. It can be a sad, military tune played

on a bugle. The poem uses the title as the start of a list of lamented people, events, creatures and other things hurt in the war, so after the word lament, every verse, and 11 lines, begin with for."For the ocean's lap with its mortal stain" refers to the blood of the dead in the water.

"For Ahmed at the closed border" may simply refer to someone who cannot return home because of the war. "The soldier in his uniform of fire" brings to mind a soldier who is on fire, perhaps the result of a the crash of a vehicle, or being hit by mortar fire. "The gunsmith...armourer, The boy fusilier" (soldier who carries a light musket...gun) all refer to those responsible for making the trappings of war, or using them. The poet laments (mourns) for them.

"The farmer's sons, in it for the music" may refer to young men who lived in the country and wanted to be a part of something bigger, drawn perhaps by radios other soldiers carried, or even for the idea that people might sing of their exploits as has been done in the past for soldiers. "For the burnt earth and the sun put out" could speak to the bombing of the earth that has scorched its surface, and the rising smoke from this that blocks out the sun because it is so thick. "The scalded ocean and the blazing well" brings to mind the terrible heat from missile fire that destroys wells, and the ocean's surface because Kuwait (where this fighting takes place) rests on the shore of the Kuwait Bay/the Persian Gulf). The last line refers to vengeance, and the sorrow the poet feels for death caused by a need for it; she also mourse for the loss of language, or the loss of voices to speak the language, perhaps the loss of the opportunity to find words of peace to stop the fighting.