Introduction
Marked with D is an adaptation of the nursery rhyme, “Pat-a-Cake, Baker Man” which deals with life since it has to do with baking a cake for a baby. Marked with D, on the other hand, is a parody of the nursery rhyme in which D stands for Death and not for the baby’s initial.
Baking and cremation
In the poem, the poet Harrison deals with harsh reality since it touches on the process of cremation. The first two lines of the poem reveal the picture of an actual corpse being burned in the process and providing the readers with ideas regarding the subject of the poem; namely, Harrison’s father – the Baker. Taken in the abstract sense, the lines suggest the negative traits of the baker. The poet, however, leaves us to make our interpretation and gives us just enough information to understand what the poem is all about.
Baking and cremation (the latter only alluded to in the poem) as registered in the lexicon would be synonymous, considering that both processes are concerned with the sourcing and application of heat. In the case of the oven, baking essentially deals with life since it is centered on cooking food for sustaining the body.
Cremation, however, has to do with death because it is centered on burning – the reduction of a dead body to ashes or dust.
As regards collocation, the oven is located in the home – an environment associated with activity and family life, the crematorium is generally situated in a place near a funeral parlor or cemetery – a place of peace. This fact would strengthen the difference between baking and cremation; between oven (life) and crematorium (death).
The third and fourth lines give evidence of the love of Harrison’s father for his mother whining the eyes of their son. This is illustrated in “radiant with the sight of his dead wife, light streaming from his mouth to shape her name.” For Harrison’s father, her name was never Florence or Flo, but always Florrie. Florence would be too formal, and Flo – too familiar. Florrie must have been his pet name for her since their courtship days.
Harrison and his father
Whether or not Harrison and his father got along, the son believed that his father filled a positive role within the bounds of marriage and family. For the son, despite his father’s being a cold and unpleasant individual, set in his ways and weighed down by his religion, his wife and family were top priority. This may have been the reason why Harrison loved and respected his parents as shown in the poem. He must have experienced close family ties.
In the last two lines of the first stanza, Harrison believed that what burdened their father was religion. “But he hungered for release from mortal speech/ that kept him down, the tongue that weighed like lead,” – Mortal speech was that of religion, which can do nothing for the individual in the long run. For Harrison, his father’s faith was a burden that blinded him to reality. The blindness may refer to actual cataracts which plagued the father in later life and which in turn symbolize the cloudiness caused by fire during cremation.
The juxtaposition of ideas expressed by “mortal speech that kept him down” and “the tongue that weighed like lead” indicates sameness. Both have an identical meaning; e.g., the spirituality of the father that weighed him down and which never left him.
Features of the poem
The entire poem is written in iambic pentameter and rhyme from beginning to end. The rhyme scheme follows the A B A B pattern. There are twelve lines in the first stanza and four in the concluding stanza. This short last stanza serves as a sad afterthought, bewailing the fact that the baker who was once his father, after the cremation, has been reduced to smoke.
Towards the end of the poem, the poet explains his own beliefs which contradict those of his father. He presents his readers with concrete realities (his father, for example) to provide a rational alternative to the idea of religion.
Harrison’s father, once again, was a very religious person who sought security within the realms of spirituality. He depended on religion to release him from a hostile world.
The son refused to acknowledge a God or subscribe to the ridiculous idea of a place one can flee to after death – “no Heaven to reach.” He is firm in his views that everything he is or will be – can only be attained here on earth.
The tongue of Harrison’s father remains cold because of all the false ideas and intentions brought about by his intense spirituality.
When the tongue burst into flames, it was unfortunate, according to the son that the spirituality survived, since the father never let go of it.
Harrison laments the fact that his father died a common middle-class person, who never had the chance to rise like the bread he baked in his lifetime. Yeast mixed with flour are important ingredients in making bread. Flour and yeast mixed with ashes (the ultimate reduction of the human body) will never produce anything that resembles bread.
Lastly, Harrison refers to England.
Once again, this may touch on the subject of religion. Some Englishmen of his time depended on spirituality as the solution for life’s problems and depended on it as an escape from reality – they depended on it as being there for them through Life and Death.
References
Mazzaro, J. Modern American Poetry: Essays in Criticism. New York: David McKay Co., Inc.
Osterwalder, H. (n.d.), ‘Eros/Jhanafos a pair’: The Dialecric of Life and Death in Tony Harrison’s Laureate^ Block, Critical Survey, Volume 17, Number 3.
Pearce, R. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton University Press, 1961.
Thorp, W., American Writing in the Twentieth Century. MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.