Samuel Tongue

And the language choices themselves are really significant because they set up this kind of mathematics of love and loss, fractal and lozenge and rhombus, these really specific shapes in the trees.

But then with that specificity, there's also quite a lot of ambiguity and

a difficulty in pinning down this figure, this female figure, that she's barely there.

There are all these exact phrases of, as I say, lozenge and rhombus, but it's all happening in this spangled shade.

So we're looking in, but we can't quite see what's happening, really.

And as the poem, as the sonnet continues and then flips into the final six lines after the volta, we're suddenly into language about

which does sound fatalistic, besieged and condemned, and the kind of loss that comes into that, but besieged by symmetries and condemned to these patterns of love and loss, almost as if the visuals, the kind of loving gaze, is a kind of entrapment in some way, besieged and condemned.

These structures, these geometries,

in language, but also in the vision that he's, that the poet's trying to create.

They're just, they're so kind of, again, claustrophobic and tight and difficult to escape.

So in the first poem, the poet's voice was talking about studying and sitting.

And here, again, there's a staring and a sitting, a kind of, yeah, an observing, a detailed observation.

So does, who is this swimmer?

So it seems to be that there is a swimmer and somewhere to swim.

But then they did.

And then this character disappears again.

She came and sat next to me after her swim, then walked away back to the trees, leaving that image of a dark butterfly.

where she'd been sitting next to this person in the poem.

One of the participants very usefully picked up on the fact that one of the important layers in this poem is that it's referring to the Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo,

And then that might have been a lot of Robin Robertson's work engages with folktale and mythology and uses those frameworks to kind of contemporize what he wants to write about, but also very much echoes the original, for want of a better word.