My Strike-a-Light
On the Isle of Whithorn on the Solway coast of Galloway, excavation of graves from the early mediaeval period turned up a smooth white quartzite pebble the size of a hen’s egg. Scratches across it showed it had been used as a “strike-a-light” for tinder. The pebble had been buried in the grave of a child.
My little light
My strike-a-light
My spark struck off
A sharp old age
O bright and likely
Shining girl
O true, O white
Most lively stone
Here is stone
My only lightling
My stricken mite
So sparky one
The strike-a-light, originally from the Mesolithic period, was a pebble that was struck against a piece of iron pyrites to produce a spark. It has a particularly evocative name, and John Birtwhistle uses it to define the character for whom the poem is an elegy – a little girl mourned perhaps by her elderly father: “My spark struck off / A sharp old age.” Those lines enact the contrast between “a sharp old age” and the suddenly seen bright light of a child, sensed almost as a splinter of the older man’s pared existence. It’s as if the colloquialism “a chip off the old block” had been reborn from wry comedy into wonderment.
A sound of lamentation is caught in the repeated “long-i” vowel-sound of “light” and its rhymes and para-rhymes (“strike”, “likely”, “lightling”, “white”, “mite”). The consonants add an appropriate abrasiveness. The noise of the strike-a-light and the pain and shock of death coalesce: the poem is a funeral-song, a keen, as well as an elegy. But the same auditory effects cross into the visual and help illuminate the brightness of the child and all the quick vivacity and clarity she represents.
There’s a change of mood at the end of the second verse, where the word “stone” appears for the first time. Even in the epigraph, the stone has been described as a pebble. Now, although the child’s death has always been central, it no longer cohabits with qualities such as “bright and likely”. The fact of death becomes immovable with the new sonic weight of “stone”.
The address, “O true, O white / Most lively stone” could be to the child or the stone. The word “true” may say something about the stone’s efficiency as a tool, but also praise the child’s qualities of constancy and honesty. The stone could justifiably be “most lively” since it’s been an inexhaustible source of light and fire. It’s as if there’s a new realisation in these lines that the child and the stone have become materially interchangeable. In the opening statement of the third verse, “Here is stone”, the mourner seems to be looking inconsolably at the child’s body.
The earlier track of sharp, bright sounds is restored in the last three lines. But a different tone is caught in the tender diminutive of “lightling” (little light) and the colloquialism of “stricken mite” and “so sparky one”. It would go too far to designate this movement as reconciliation: it’s perhaps the domestication of stark bereavement that is recorded, and the gradual accommodations of memory.
Perhaps the strike-a-light was originally buried with the little girl because it represented the task she was entrusted to perform by her household. She was most often seen by the illumination of the sparks she struck. The poem brings her out of the shadows by the striking of sounds and lighting of images through language. Firstly a lament, it also gives us a metaphorical figure for the poet’s craft.
• My Strike-a-Light is from Partial Shade, John Birtwhistle’s collection of new and previously seen poems, published by Carcanet.
