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Heliographer. I thought we were sitting in the sky My father decoded the world beneath our tenement, the rival football grounds, the long bridges, slung out across the river Then I gave myself a fright with the lemonade bottle. Clunk – The glass thread butting my teeth
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Heliographer I thought we were sitting in the sky My father decoded the world beneath our tenement, the rival football grounds, the long bridges, slung out across the river Then I gave myself a fright with the lemonade bottle. Clunk – The glass thread butting my teeth As I bolted my mouth to the lip.
Naw…copy me. It’s how the grown-ups drink. Propped in my shaky, Single-handed grip, I tilted the bottle towards the sun Until it detonated with light, My lips pursed like a trumpeter’s Don Paterson
Heliographer • A heliograph is an instrument for studying the sun it can also be used for plotting your position. So Don Paterson uses this idea to symbolise the way the boy sees the sun through the bottom of his lemonade bottle and to represent the way the boy now sees himself as part of the adult world.
Heliographer Notes- The Idea • This poem by the Dundee poet Don Paterson tackles one of the oldest subjects in literature; the theme of growing up or coming of age. The boy in the poem is young and innocent . His father is pointing out the landmarks of Dundee from their tenement window when he try's to take a drink from the bottle of juice he has. He makes a mess of it and hurts his mouth. His dad shows him how grown-ups do it and the boy enters the world of the grown-ups in a blaze of sunshine through the bottom of the bottle.
Heliographer Imagery • Paterson uses wonderfully short visual images to capture the view being taken I by the two characters in the poem. If you know Dundee you can see what he is describing, even if you don’t the things he picks out have a significance. The ‘rival football grounds’ tells us a lot about the dad and the boy as does the word ‘ tenement ‘ to describe the houses they live in. These are ordinary working class people living in a city like so many others.
‘sitting in the sky’ • This image is great because it makes it seem as if the boy and his father are in a special place flying , looking down on the world. It gives the rest of the poem a feeling of magic even when the events in the poem are quite ordinary. This is part of the reason why this poem is effective because it takes something very ordinary and gives it a feeling of wonder. The image of father and son flying together is like of the Greek myth of Icarus and Deadalous.
Icarus and Dedalus • Icarus and Dedalus, father and son, were imprisoned on an island surrounded by enormous cliffs. Deadalus made wings of feather and wax for his son and himself to fly from the island warning his son not to fly too near the sun or his wings would melt. Overjoyed at being able to fly Icarurs flew too near the sun and fell to his death in the sea below as his father watched.
Icarus and Dedalus • Just like the two characters in mythology this father and son are trapped in their tenement. They see the world laid out before them and the father helps his son fly free from childhood with this simple act of growing up…drinking out of a glass bottle. We are made to think of two things escaping from our childhood and escaping from Dundee and our mundane lives.We are also given a sense of wonder in ordinary things.
slung out across the river • The use of the verb slung has the effect of making the bridges seem as if they have only this minute been thrown there almost carelessly. Paterson gives us the feeling that the boy’s world is unfolding in front of him as his dad describes the town
Clunk • The word ‘clunk’ is onomatopoeic. It imitates the sound that it is describing. The poet brings the poem to an abrupt halt with this sound and the dash which follows it to share this sense of fright that the boy in the poem feels.
I tilted the bottle towards the sununtil it detonated with light,
The ordinary made special • The image of the trumpeter is effective because for the boy learning to drink from the bottle is like entering the adult world. Important events are often signalled by the blowing of trumpets. The end of the world is supposed to be announced by an angel blowing a trumpet. Paterson uses these associations to share the boys sense that something very wonderful has just happened to him.
