Samuel Tongue

and utilizes what's there in the original to add those layers.

So the story going that the nymph, Daphne, beautiful nymph, as a daughter of a river god, so there's the water, there's the water imagery, resists and rejects Apollo's advances, who is the god of light, is the god of sunlight, as well as many other things.

And she is turned into a laurel tree,

So here, that line that when she stopped, the water stopped and the sun remade her as a tree is a kind of direct link to that, back to that story.

What was quite interesting was that nobody really mentioned that story until the kind of conclusion of the conversations that we were having.

So again, the skill in the poetic is that you don't need to necessarily know those myths and kind of...

Yeah, I think it might be in Ovid's Metamorphoses as well.

You don't need that kind of classical vocabulary or ear, but once you know it's there, it just adds another really golden line of interpretation and meaning which you can use in your own reading.

So it's got backdrop and it's got foreground at the same time.

That is a lot to be going on in a sonnet.

The sonnet form being really, really useful and important to frame those big themes.

And that's what I mean by when we looked at it on the page, it looks clearly that it's a sonnet.

But as you delve in, you get deeper and deeper into the language, into the imagery.

And you get lost inside it and it's such an expansive form in Robin Robertson's hands.

So those are just a little bit of an insight into the discussions that we had and that are available to you if you join as a friend of the Scottish Poetry Library and you can come to our monthly sessions and discuss some of the poems that we choose to look at.

Yeah, and it's not a school test.

There's no exams.

It's just an enjoyment.

It's just people coming together to enjoy poetry.

And in this day and age, I think that's a very important thing and quite a rare thing.