The Falling of Katja by Rosalind Scarlett

Psychologically, it may suggest the dilemma of regression, and the fact that there’s often a false refuge to be found in the repetition of the past, or the escape into dreams. The antithesis of “hard soft” has a sexual undertone, and also signals the difficulty of separating danger from pleasure. So the girls are drawn down by the tree, pulled back “to carve their initials // into its hard soft skin”. Was it once a girl, now, like Daphne in the myth of Daphne and Apollo, transformed into a tree? The tree itself is somewhat passive: it stands still, and lets the wind stroke its leaves. The traditionally romantic foreplay of fingers through hair may be a sinister appropriation, but the girls are powerless to resist.

Even their hair is ready for its fate: “all those girls / their long smooth hair / waiting, waiting for someone / anyone to run their fingers through it”. The tree and its companion, the wind, represent some quiet but irresistible force that draws the girls down and back. Until the mother enters the concluding stanzas, it’s a narrative of inevitability, though the regretful tone in the reiteration of “all those girls” seems to invite a feminist interpretation. The poem, in spare, unpunctuated tercets, seems to “fall” floatingly down the page, its many present participles (“folding”, “running”, “waiting”, “pulling”, “crumpling”, “waiting” etc) evoking slow but continuous movement. No apple is eaten, although there is a significant tree. They lack that big allegorical role of stand-in for fallible humanity: their falling is specific to a vision of simple girlhood. The girls don’t seem to be mythological figures. The focus is on “all those girls”, the phrase being repeated like a sigh. In this week’s poem, Laura Scott begins a story whose title might seem to point towards Genesis and a retelling of the myth of the Fall. Personal micro-myths, stories of the self and its significant encounters, are favoured over the big, foundational mythologies, although there are also many revisionist treatments of the classic stories, letting in new light from new social and political contexts. Contemporary lyric poetry is replete with myth.

The Falling of Katja by Rosalind Scarlett