Cold Knap Lake

There actually is such a place as Cold Knap Lake, and it used to fascinate my students to think it actually existed. They always seemed to think that poetry was imaginary and fantasy and could not relate to real people or real lives. Cold Knap Lake is in South Wales… maybe I should visit it having taught the poem so many times?

This poem was always a success, it’s so visual and yet so mysterious, so apparently obvious and yet with so many subtle shades of meaning:

Cold Knap Lake

We once watched a crowd
pull a drowned child from the lake.
Blue lipped and dressed in water’s long green silk
she lay for dead.

Then kneeling on the earth,
a heroine, her red head bowed,
her wartime cotton frock soaked,
my mother gave a stranger’s child her breath.
The crowd stood silent,
drawn by the dread of it.

The child breathed, bleating
and rosy in my mother’s hands.
My father took her home to a poor house
and watched her thrashed for almost drowning.

Was I there?
Or is that troubled surface something else
shadowy under the dipped fingers of willows
where satiny mud blooms in cloudiness
after the treading, heavy webs of swans
as their wings beat and whistle on the air?

All lost things lie under closing water
in that lake with the poor man’s daughter.

Gillian Clarke