Genetics

Overview

A speaker reflects on how their parents remain connected through them, despite separation and distance. The poem explores identity, inheritance and family relationships through the image of the speaker's hands.

Main themes

Family, identity, parent-child relationships, inheritance, belonging, past vs future.

Tone and voice

Patient, thoughtful, reflective, accepting, assured. First person perspective.

Context

Published in 2005, in The State of the Prisons. Morrissey wrote the poem after returning to Northern Ireland in 1999, around a decade after her parents' divorce. Both parents had moved to other countries after separating.

Form and structure

A villanelle consisting of 19 lines: five tercets and a final quatrain. Repetition creates a cyclical structure, and the repeated lines mirror the way genetic material is passed through generations with variations.

Poetic devices to spot

• Repetition and refrains.
• Cyclical structure.
• First person voice.
• Symbolism of hands, fingers and palms.
• Religious imagery – chapel, steeple, priest and psalms.
• Half-rhyme (slant rhyme).
• Iambic pentameter in some lines.

by Sinéad Morrissey

My father’s in my fingers, but my mother’s in my palms.I lift them up and look at them with pleasure –I know my parents made me by my hands.

They may have been repelled to separate lands,to separate hemispheres, may sleep with other lovers,but in me they touch where fingers link to palms.

With nothing left of their togetherness but friendswho quarry for their image by a river,at least I know their marriage by my hands.

I shape a chapel where a steeple stands.
And when I turn it over,my father’s by my fingers, my mother’s by my palms

demure before a priest reciting psalms.My body is their marriage register.I re-enact their wedding with my hands.

So take me with you, take up the skin’s demandsfor mirroring in bodies of the future.I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms.We know our parents make us by our hands.

From The State of the Prisons (2005), by kind permission of the author and Carcanet Press.

A link to this poem is available in the CCEA Poetry Anthology which can be downloaded from the CCEA website.

The BBC is not responsible for the contents of any other sites listed.

A speaker explores the idea that much of who we are comes from our biological parents, no matter what has changed in life, or how distant we may be from them. First published in 2005.

Title: A single word title which describes the process of studying biologically inherited traits; it is the name of a branch of science, indicating close analysis of a concept and linking to the poet’s deep thoughts about her identity. The word ‘Genetics’ is not technically a plural but the ‘s’ ending makes it sound like one, which fits with the poem’s theme of traits being shared across many beings.

Themes: Family, identity, parent-child relationships, inheritance, belonging, past vs future.

Tone: Patient, thoughtful, reflective, accepting, assured.

Speaker: First person perspective; the poet herself speaking on the personal issue of her parents’ divorce and her own sense of belonging.

• Sinéad Morrissey is an award-winning poet who was born in Armagh in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. Her parents were politically involved in anti-war movements and supported communist ideals, which put the needs of society at large over the needs of any individual. The publication that featured Genetics was her third poetry collection, The State of the Prisons, which was largely concerned with historical figures and injustices they suffered. Within the collection, Genetics is an unusually personal poem; this could indicate that it was included not because it had strong thematic links to the other poems, but because it represented a significant moment for the poet within her own life at that time.
• Morrissey notes that she wrote the poem when she moved back to Northern Ireland in 1999, around a decade after her parents’ divorce. Her mother and father had both moved to other countries after splitting up and Morrissey herself had spent years teaching and living abroad. Children of any age can experience significant trauma from their parents divorcing; the fact that the poem combines a quietly accepting tone with a sense of assurance and even “pleasure” in her own identity as being clearly and physically her parents’ child shows that Morrissey seems to have come to terms with her parents' separation and has processed it in a way which makes her glad it once existed rather than regretful that it didn’t last.
• Morrissey has many influences but has noted she was particularly inspired by Welsh poet RS Thomas (a former cleric and the author of Here); she wrote that she admired him “because he is absolutely faithful to his own poetic concerns, regardless of a predominantly atheistic environment and changing literary fashions”. This sense of the importance of faithfully being oneself ties in with the strong and assured sense of identity the poet shows in Genetics.

Only a little context is needed for each poem; where used, it should be applied to the point you're making.

• The poem is a villanelle, which follows strict rules about structure. It has nineteen lines divided into five tercets (three line stanzas) and one four line quatrain at the end. Morrissey chose this form for the poem as soon as she first had the idea for it, noting: “The most important thing about the poem is not so much what it’s saying but the form in which the poem is written… while I knew the poem had to be a villanelle when I wrote it, I didn’t know exactly why that subject fitted that form so perfectly, but once I’d written it I realised there was a kind of mirroring between the lines of the poem that repeat and fall through the poem in slightly different variations and the way in which genetic material is passed down through the generations with slightly different variations each time. I think it’s a villanelle because it’s the most accurate poetic map of the genome.”
• Repetition is another feature of the villanelle form - the first line of the first stanza is repeated in the last line of the second and fourth stanza, while the third line of the first stanza is repeated in the last line of the third and fifth stanzas. These two repeated lines from the first stanza then become the last two lines of the poem. This creates a cyclical structure that circles back to return to its own beginning, which makes it a particularly apt form for exploring themes of time, memory and how the past affects the future. The cyclical pattern suggests the circle of life, with its repeated endings and beginnings, as she contemplates having children of her own in the future.
• The rhyme scheme of each tercet is ABA as required in a villanelle form, although most of the rhymes are slant rhymes or half-rhymes rather than perfect matches for the other sounds with which they’re paired. As an example, Morrissey rhymes “palms” with “hands”, “lands” and “stands” at various points. These rhymes are similar but not exactly alike, just like the combinations of genetic traits people inherit from their parents.
• The poem does not have a consistent metre, given that the use of rhyme and repetition is more important in forming a villanelle. However, it does contain a few lines (3, 4, 9, 10 and 13 for example) written in iambic pentameter, which is the traditional poetic metre used in poems about love. One ‘iamb’ is a two-beat combination: an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed (emphasised) syllable, making a ‘da-DUM’ pattern, like a heartbeat. Pentameter means five of these two-beat units per line, making ten syllables altogether:
  
  

  | I know | my pa- | -rents made | me by | my hands |
  | da-DUM | da-DUM | da-DUM | da-DUM | da-DUM |

  
  Mostly, however, the lines vary from this pattern, containing many more syllables or even sometimes fewer. This means the poem’s metre varies slightly in each line, mirroring the slight variations in each generation of family.

• Symbolism: Morrissey’s hands form the central image of the poem; they are a symbol, both physically and metaphorically, of how she is a blend of both her parents with characteristics from each of them. Her physical body, as represented by her hands, is a permanent testament to the now broken marriage of her parents and the family they once had together. She notes that “in me they touch where fingers link to palms” – her hands are now the only place where the parents still connect, because they are now so far apart from each other. She remains as the sole evidence of their former closeness and her hands are the clearest illustration of this, representing her past and giving her a strong and definite sense of who she is. She proposes they can also represent the future if she can “bequeath” her fingers to any children she has, ensuring a sense of continuity and identity along the family line.

• Religious imagery: Imagery of the wedding of her parents features in the fourth and fifth stanzas, contrasting the physical and bodily side of procreation with the idea of a marriage as a spiritual union and a religious sacrament. Mentions of the “priest”, “psalms”, the “chapel” and the “steeple” are examples of religious imagery and all evoke a sense of the marriage as solemn and important – something done as a proper ceremony and blessed by religion. The fact that the marriage did not survive gives the sense that physical genetics will always outlast even the most serious religious commitment. The parents are no longer joined in life by their religious ceremony, but they remain forever joined in their daughter’s physical being and in the “bodies of the future”.

demure before a priest reciting psalms.
My body is their marriage register.
I re-enact their wedding with my hands.

• Metaphor: In the fifth stanza, Morrissey writes “my body is their marriage register”, making her physical self a metaphor that represents the union of her parents. She asserts that she herself is the proof that the marriage happened, although it is now gone. Her body endures as a testament to the fact they were once together, and flesh and blood provides a better record of their union than a piece of paper that represents a ceremony long ago. The refrain “My father’s in my fingers but my mother’s in my palms” is itself metaphorical, using the resemblance between her features and the same features in each parent as literal proof of their influence as a presence within her. The imagery suggesting that her parents “quarry for their image by a river” suggest they are looking for something – the loss of their marriage and subsequent difficulty in defining their new relationship to one another means they have to metaphorically ‘dig’ for a new sense of who they are in relation to one another. Their daughter, however, finds all the sense of self she needs in the physical reality of her hands and the sense of belonging they give her, linking her to both parents and to their once-unified family.

• Allusion: “I shape a chapel where a steeple stands” is an allusion to the short nursery rhyme “Here is the Church”, which accompanies each line of the rhyme with a hand action to depict a church steeple and a congregation of people inside it. This reference adds a childlike simplicity to the speaker’s outlook, particularly as she recounts acting out the wedding with her hands, representing it as if she is a child playing a game. Replaying the wedding in her mind does not seem to show a person stuck in the past or someone who has regrets about how things turned out; rather it seems as though she is using the innocent idea of the church and the wedding to gently acknowledge her lineage and identity, using the hands that have outlasted the marriage as reminders of who she is.

• Consonance: The innocent image of the wedding she re-enacts is evoked through use of consonance in the fourth and fifth stanzas. “I shape a chapel where a steeple stands” contains choppy ‘p’ sounds and lilting ‘l’ sounds that create a sense of childlike playfulness, while the lines “my mother’s in my palms / demure before a priest reciting psalms” repeat murmuring ‘m’ sounds, liquid ‘r’ sounds and gentle sibilance to create a hushed, reverent tone in describing the wedding scene. It all helps to create the poem’s overall reflective and gently positive tone of acceptance of the past and hope for the future.

This is not a list of every method or notable use of language and structure in Genetics.

Look at the poem again. Can you find any of the following?

If you have found these methods, consider what you know about the poem and the poet already.

What effects do these methods create? Why has the poet used them?

• Catrin – another poem which explores links between parent and child, both physical and emotional.

• I Remember, I Remember – Larkin’s disappointment in his childhood and his conclusion that he would have felt the same anywhere could be used alongside Genetics to examine how nature (determined by genes) or nurture (determined by experience) affected each poet.

• Here – aside from Morrissey’s admiration of Thomas as a poet, the speaker in Genetics has a sense of assured positivity about her identity and a willingness to build a future family which contrasts well with the speaker in Here who is guilty about his past, stuck in his present and full of existential questions about who he really is.

Use these questions to hone your knowledge of Genetics, and to practise using your notes and analysis in organised paragraphs that focus on how particular themes or ideas are shown in the poem. There is an example answer in the following section to demonstrate how you can do this.

• How does Morrissey illustrate the idea of family in Genetics?
• How does Morrissey create a sense that the speaker is secure in their identity in Genetics?
• What does Genetics show us about Morrissey’s attitude to relationships?
• What poetic methods does Morrissey use to show her feelings about her parents in Genetics?

Below is a demonstration of how to use the material in this section to answer an example essay question. The answer below is not a full essay, but only an extract of a longer answer showing some of the points that could be made.

Q: How does Morrissey create a sense that the speaker is secure in their identity in Genetics?

A: The first person speaker in Sinéad Morrissey’s Genetics is the poet herself; she acknowledges that she wrote the poem around ten years after her parents’ divorce, after being struck by how clearly her hands represented each respective parent’s physical features. Divorce can be traumatic for the children of the divorcees, even if those children are adults when it happens, but the tone of the poem is not bitter or regretful and Morrissey expresses no resentment or wistfulness towards her parents for choosing to separate. Instead, she uses her hands as a recurring symbol throughout the poem to express her strong sense of self, giving the clear impression that she feels strongly connected to her parents and pleased to be an embodiment of the fact that they were once together even though they are now apart. She seems to gain comfort from the fact she is so clearly the child of both her parents, and it seems to have given her a strong sense of belonging that has made her feel very secure in her own identity.

In the second line of the poem, Morrissey states that lifts her hands and look at them “with pleasure”. Noticing that her fingers resemble her father’s and her palms resemble her mother’s is something she enjoys – she is pleased to be a combination of both parents and it seems to make her feel loved and secure with a clear sense of belonging and knowing who she is. In the second stanza, Morrissey uses repetition of “separate” in the lines “to separate lands,/ to separate hemispheres” to emphasise how far apart her parents now are, but she adds that “in me they touch where fingers link to palms”, using the metaphor that her hands and their respective features represent her actual parents and their physical togetherness. She adds to this later in the poem with another metaphor: “my body is their marriage register”, showing that her flesh and blood provides a better record of the parents’ union than a piece of paper that represents a ceremony from long ago. The idea that her physical body is the only place that her parents are now united does not seem to make her sad; instead she is glad to be the only remaining symbol of their union, and this gives her a secure sense of her identity as a unique tribute to the fact that they were once a married couple.

This essay could go on to make the following points, backed up by evidence from the poem and detailed analysis of that evidence:

• Morrissey uses matter-of-fact declarative sentences for the third and last lines of the poem: “I know my parents made me by my hands” and “We know our parents make us by our hands”. These give an assured tone and a sense of clear certainty about her connection to her parents, making her sound like she feels secure in her own identity.
• Morrissey uses the metaphor of her parents having to “quarry for their image by a river” suggesting that they have lost part of their own identities and have to search for a new identity in the wake of the marriage breakup; in contrast, Morrissey herself feels secure in her identity as their child, even when they are all far apart.
• The poem finishes with the poet addressing her husband and proposing they “take up the skin’s demands” by having children of their own, suggesting she is secure enough in her own identity to raise and nurture the next generation.