Look We Have Coming to Dover! Summary & Analysis
by Daljit Nagra

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  • “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” Introduction

    • "Look We Have Coming to Dover!" is the title poem from Daljit Nagra's prize-winning 2007 collection. A dramatic monologue spoken by a new immigrant to England, it portrays a group of immigrants' first years in the country—from their dangerous arrival, to their under-the-table jobs, to their wistful hopes for the future. The speaker highlights the struggles of immigrant life: the lack of official documentation, the difficulty of finding work and housing, and the threat of violence and deportation. But the poem's sparky, inventive language suggests that immigration is a revitalizing force, offering immigrants' adoptive countries fresh energy and fresh perspectives.

  • “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” Summary

    • We sail across the English Channel through a harsh fume-laden wind, the diesel motor of our boat going at full speed across the water. We are splashed by spit-like surf, sent flying toward us by cruise ships, on which rich tourists stand tall as if in command of the obedient waves.

      Seabirds and other coastal creatures make angry noises at us; we huddle together as the boat goes past the huge, crumbling cliffs of Dover. We hurry across soggy ground while an aggressive thunderstorm crashes all around us; we make it ashore, and bundle into a small van.

      Once inland, we work various jobs—especially in agriculture—for years. We try to avoid being detected by the State or those who might harm us. If we have to, we sleep in chilly parks. Life is tough but we are proud, and together we are an important, powerful force (like electricity).

      There are crowds of us working through the darkness, avoiding the light of the moon, hoping that one day the metaphorical sun will shine on us—that a rainbow will appear, and we can officially live happier, freer lives. Then, and only then, we will pull ourselves up and proudly walk out into the light.

      I imagine myself, my lover, and our friends living the good life, with money, cars, nice clothes—in a word, with freedom. We'll raise glasses of champagne toward the East above sunlit tables, chatting in our own language, happily freckled with the chalk dust of the British coastline!

  • “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” Themes

    • Theme The Hardship and Hope of Immigration

      The Hardship and Hope of Immigration

      "Look We Have Coming to Dover!" explores the lives of undocumented immigrants in the United Kingdom. The speaker, one of a group of immigrants from the “East” who make the dangerous journey from the European mainland to Dover, describes the difficulty of their new life in the UK. While the speaker seems to feel hopeful for the future, the poem’s ironic tone suggests that the speaker’s new country is as likely to thwart the speaker’s dreams as to fulfill them. Being an undocumented immigrant, this poem suggests, means both hoping for great things from one’s new country, and facing seemingly endless barriers from that country’s government and people.

      Newly arrived immigrants, the speaker observes, encounter hostility from their adopted country from the moment they set foot on land: the country’s citizens (and even the landscape itself) treat them as unwanted invaders. As the speaker arrives in England in a boat with other immigrants, even the sea seems antagonistic, churning up "gobfuls of surf” to spit at them. Those “gobfuls” come from the wash of cruise ships carrying privileged tourists who can come and go as they please—unlike the speaker. “Lording the ministerial waves,” these wealthy travelers suggest the huge gap in status and power between people who are legally allowed to be in the country and people who are not.

      That gap only becomes clearer when the speaker ironically describes the immigrants "invad[ing]" England in "swarms," using language that suggests that England (or sections of its population) sees new immigrants as enemies or pests, not just people trying to live their lives. Existence as an undocumented immigrant, then, demands courage, resilience, and determination—and the ability to keep going even when one's adopted country treats one badly.

      England's hostility doesn't magically go away as the immigrants settle into their new country, the poem implies. In fact, that hostility defines how the immigrants must go about their lives, limiting their options and leaving them in fear of discovery. Even though the immigrants “graft” (or work hard) at low-paid but essential jobs like farming, keeping the country running, the UK refuses to legally acknowledge them. They have no access to proper housing or medical care, they’re forced to sleep in parks, and they must constantly evade detection (being "clocked by the national eye") and the threat of violence ("stab[s] in the back"). Because the UK sees them as dehumanized “swarms” of invaders, they’re forced to live without many of the basic certainties that the comfortable world around them takes for granted.

      In these painful and frightening conditions, the speaker and friends survive through hard work and hope of making a better life someday. But the poem offers no assurances that the immigrants' hopes will come true, suggesting that the uncertainty of immigrant existence doesn't necessarily get better over time. Dreaming of a "miracle" by which they’ll be "passport[ed] to life"—the day when they can be fully-fledged citizens without having to hide—the speaker envisions a rosy future in which the speaker and their "love" will be in the "clear," raising a toast towards the "East" from which they arrived. They'll have money, a nice car, smart clothes. As the poem puts it, they'll be "free."

      But this is just what the speaker "imagine[s]": there is no guarantee that any of this will become a reality. The poem's celebration of "Britannia" at the end, then, doesn't quite ring true, sounding more ironic than sincerely joyful. Being an undocumented immigrant, this poem concludes, can mean clinging to a hopeful vision of the future even in the face of overwhelming difficulties and uncertainty.

      Where this theme appears in the poem:
      • Lines 1-25
  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Look We Have Coming to Dover!”

    • Lines 1-3

      Stowed in the ...
      ... into the tide,

      The poem opens with an epigraph taken from a much earlier poem, Matthew Arnold's 1851 "Dover Beach." In that poem, a first-person speaker looks out to sea from the cliffs of Dover in the southeast of England, and worries about the the future—in particular, about his sense that Christian civilization is on the wane.

      Nagra alludes to this poem ironically. "Look We Have Coming to Dover!" is a poem from the perspective of a recent (and undocumented) immigrant, and Nagra's quotation here plays on populist fears that the arrival of immigrants in England signals some kind of degeneration, a threat to a particular way of life. The speaker in this poem has the reverse perspective, looking towards England, not out to sea. The "various," "beautiful," and "new" land in Arnold's poem is, from the speaker's perspective, a land of dreams. The arriving immigrants hope that they'll start a new and better life when they reach shore.

      Dover Beach is a historically important site in English history and has always been a major gateway to the country—especially for hostile forces. The opening lines here establish the poem's use of metaphorical language related to invasion, describing how the speaker and others are:

      Stowed in the sea to invade
      the lash alfresco of diesel-breeze
      ratcheting speed into the tide[.]

      England's right-wing press and anti-immigration rhetoric frequently use this kind of language, heightening the sense that immigrants pose a threat to the basic structure of society. Like the allusion to "Dover Beach," this military lexicon is also ironic: the speaker and the others on the boat are not really invading the country. They are trying to get to England via unofficial channels in the hope of a better standard of life.

      They feel themselves "invad[ing]," not England, but the "lash alfresco of a diesel-breeze"—that is, the harsh, fume-laden air that surrounds their small boat. "Alfresco" is an Italian word that translates as "in fresh air," but in English specifically refers to outdoor dining—a luxurious connotation that feels intentionally awkward and out of place. It anticipates the poem's juxtaposition between the immigrants on their little boat and the tourists on the nearby cruise ships, who enjoy gourmet food while the immigrants struggle to survive the crossing.

    • Lines 3-5

      with brunt ...
      ... the ministered waves.

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    • Lines 6-10

      Seagull and shoal ...
      ... a Bedford van.

    • Lines 11-15

      Seasons or years ...
      ... pylon and pylon.

    • Lines 16-20

      Swarms of us, ...
      ... for the clear.

    • Lines 21-23

      Imagine my love ...
      ... crash clothes, free,

    • Lines 24-25

      we raise our ...
      ... chalk of Britannia!

  • “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Alliteration

      Alliteration, like assonance and consonance, helps bring the poem's many images to life on the page, and intensifies the different moods in each stanza.

      The first two stanzas describe the immigrants' perilous crossing from the European mainland to Dover in a small boat. Here, alliteration conjures an atmosphere of threat and potential danger, as well as the terrible weather.

      For instance, listen to all the /c/ alliteration and /s/ sibilance in lines 8-9:

      camouflage past the vast crumble of scummed
      cliffs, scramming on mulch as thunder unbladders

      All these harsh /c/ sounds work with consonance (e.g. "scummed" in line 8) to make this whole section terrifying: an onslaught of hard, rocky sounds mirrors the intensity of landing on a pebbly beach in a gale. And the sibilant /s/ sounds evoke the stormy hiss of wind and waves.

      Later on, alliterative sounds draw attention to important moments in the poem. Take a look at these lines from the third stanza, for instance:

      burdened, ennobled, poling sparks across pylon and pylon.

      Here, the speaker pictures the immigrants as a kind of metaphorical "electricity" keeping the country running through their unseen work. The strong /p/ alliteration here emphasizes this idea, connecting one word to another just like electrical wires linking "pylons."

      Alliteration also plays a thematic role in this poem. Daljit Nagra has said that he wanted the strong alliteration and consonance here to recall the punchy, repetitive sounds of Anglo-Saxon verse. And Anglo-Saxons, of course, were some of the earliest immigrants to the British isles!

      Where alliteration appears in the poem:
      • Line 1: “Stowed,” “sea”
      • Line 4: “cushy come-and-go”
      • Line 5: “cruisers”
      • Line 8: “camouflage,” “crumble”
      • Line 9: “cliffs”
      • Line 13: “back,” “breathing”
      • Line 15: “poling,” “pylon,” “pylon”
      • Line 20: “human,” “hoick”
      • Line 22: “Blair’d,” “cash”
      • Line 23: “beeswax’d,” “cars,” “crash clothes”
    • Allusion

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      Where allusion appears in the poem:
      • Before Line 1: “"So various, so beautiful, so new…" / — Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach"”
      • Line 21: “my love and I,”
      • Line 25: “the chalk of Britannia!”
    • Assonance

      Where assonance appears in the poem:
      • Line 2: “lash alfresco,” “diesel-breeze”
      • Line 3: “speed”
      • Line 7: “upon,” “huddled”
      • Line 8: “past,” “ vast,” “crumble,” “scummed”
      • Line 9: “mulch,” “thunder unbladders”
      • Line 11: “Seasons,” “we reap”
      • Line 13: “stab,” “back,” “teemed,” “breathing”
      • Line 14: “sweeps”
      • Line 15: “ennobled, poling,” “pylon,” “pylon”
      • Line 17: “shot”
      • Line 18: “spotlight”
      • Line 22: “cash”
      • Line 23: “beeswax’d,” “crash”
      • Line 24: “charged glasses”
    • Caesura

      Where caesura appears in the poem:
      • Line 3: “tide, with”
      • Line 5: “cruisers, lording”
      • Line 9: “cliffs, scramming”
      • Line 10: “escape, hutched”
      • Line 12: “inland, unclocked”
      • Line 13: “back, teemed”
      • Line 15: “burdened, ennobled, poling”
      • Line 16: “us, grafting”
      • Line 18: “spotlight, banking”
      • Line 19: “rainbow, passport,” “life. Only”
      • Line 20: “ourselves, bare-faced”
      • Line 22: “others, Blair’d”
      • Line 23: “cars, our,” “clothes, free,”
      • Line 25: “East, babbling,” “lingoes, flecked”
    • Consonance

      Where consonance appears in the poem:
      • Line 1: “Stowed,” “sea,” “invade”
      • Line 2: “lash alfresco,” “diesel-breeze”
      • Line 3: “ratcheting,” “speed,” “into,” “tide,” “brunt”
      • Line 4: “gobfuls of surf,” “phlegmed,” “cushy come-and-go”
      • Line 5: “prow’d,” “lording,” “ministered”
      • Line 6: “Seagull,” “shoal life”
      • Line 7: “Vexin,” “blarnies upon,” “huddled”
      • Line 8: “camouflage,” “past,” “vast,” “crumble,” “scummed”
      • Line 9: “cliffs,” “scramming,” “mulch,” “thunder unbladders”
      • Line 10: “rain and wind,” “hutched,” “Bedford”
      • Line 11: “Seasons,” “years”
      • Line 12: “inland, unclocked”
      • Line 13: “stab,” “back,” “breathing”
      • Line 14: “sweeps,” “grass,” “whistling,” “ asthma,” “parks”
      • Line 15: “burdened, ennobled,” “poling,” “sparks across,” “pylon,” “pylon”
      • Line 16: “Swarms,” “us”
      • Line 17: “shot”
      • Line 18: “spotlight,” “sun”
      • Line 19: “span,” “rainbow,” “passport”
      • Line 20: “human,” “hoick”
      • Line 22: “Blair’d,” “cash”
      • Line 23: “beeswax’d,” “cars,” “crash clothes”
      • Line 24: “glasses,” “unparasol’d tables”
      • Line 25: “babbling,” “lingoes,” “flecked,” “chalk”
    • Enjambment

      Where enjambment appears in the poem:
      • Lines 1-2: “invade / the”
      • Lines 2-3: “diesel-breeze / ratcheting”
      • Lines 3-4: “brunt / gobfuls”
      • Lines 4-5: “come-and-go / tourists”
      • Lines 6-7: “life / Vexin”
      • Lines 7-8: “huddled / camouflage”
      • Lines 8-9: “scummed / cliffs,”
      • Lines 9-10: “unbladders / yobbish”
      • Lines 11-12: “reap / inland,”
      • Lines 12-13: “eye / or”
      • Lines 13-14: “breathing / sweeps”
      • Lines 16-17: “in / the”
      • Lines 17-18: “moon’s / spotlight”
      • Lines 18-19: “sun — / span”
      • Lines 19-20: “then / can”
      • Lines 21-22: “I, / our”
      • Lines 22-23: “cash / of”
      • Lines 23-24: “free, / we”
      • Lines 24-25: “tables / East,”
    • Irony

      Where irony appears in the poem:
      • Lines 1-3: “Stowed in the sea to / the lash alfresco of a diesel-breeze / ratcheting speed into the tide”
      • Line 1: “invade”
      • Line 16: “Swarms of us”
      • Lines 21-25: “Imagine my love and I, / our sundry others, Blair’d in the cash / of our beeswax’d cars, our crash clothes, free, / we raise our charged glasses over unparasol’d tables / East, babbling our lingoes, flecked by the chalk of Britannia!”
    • Juxtaposition

      Where juxtaposition appears in the poem:
      • Lines 1-5: “Stowed in the sea to invade / the lash alfresco of a diesel-breeze / ratcheting speed into the tide, with brunt / gobfuls of surf phlegmed by cushy come-and-go / tourists prow’d on the cruisers, lording the ministered waves.”
    • Metaphor

      Where metaphor appears in the poem:
      • Lines 1-3
      • Lines 3-5
      • Lines 6-7
      • Lines 9-10
      • Line 10
      • Lines 11-13
      • Line 14
      • Line 15
      • Line 16
      • Lines 16-18
      • Lines 18-19
      • Line 19
      • Lines 19-20
      • Lines 22-23
      • Line 25
    • Personification

      Where personification appears in the poem:
      • Lines 6-7: “Seagull and shoal life / Vexin their blarnies”
      • Lines 9-10: “thunder unbladders / yobbish rain and wind on our escape”
  • “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Stowed
    • Lash
    • Diesel-breeze
    • Alfresco
    • Ratcheting
    • Gobfuls
    • Brunt
    • Surf
    • Phlegmed
    • Cushy
    • Cruisers
    • Prow'd
    • Lording
    • Ministered
    • Shoal
    • Vexin
    • Blarnies
    • Scummed
    • Mulch
    • Scramming
    • Yobbish
    • Unbladders
    • Hutched
    • Bedford Van
    • The National Eye
    • Unclocked
    • Teemed
    • Pylon
    • Grafting
    • Banking
    • Hoick
    • Sundry
    • Blair'd
    • Beeswax'd
    • Crash Clothes
    • Unparasol'd Tables
    • Charged Glasses
    • Babbling
    • Lingoes
    • Chalk
    • Flecked
    • Britannia
    Stowed
    • (Location in poem: Line 1: “Stowed in the sea to invade”)

      Packed—with connotations of "hidden," like stowaways.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Look We Have Coming to Dover!”

    • Form

      "Look We Have Coming to Dover!" is a dramatic monologue, giving voice to an immigrant speaker who chronicles the life of immigrants more generally. That monologue uses five stanzas of five lines each (also known as quintets or cinquains).

      This isn't a conventional poetic form like the sonnet or the villanelle, but it is pretty tightly organized. Each stanza starts short and grows longer on the page as the lines unfold, so the whole poem takes on a wave-like shape. This recalls the rough seas the immigrants travel to get to Dover, but also gestures towards the way that people sometimes metaphorically refer to "waves" of immigration.

      The poem also responds to (and ironically subverts) Matthew Arnold's famous "Dover Beach," which it quotes in an epigraph. Where Arnold's speaker, a worried Englishman, stands on the Dover cliffs looking out to sea, Nagra's speaker rides in on the sea looking up at the Dover cliffs—a mirrored perspective that shapes the poem's ideas about belonging and identity.

    • Meter

      "Look We Have Coming to Dover!" is written in free verse, which means that the speaker can shape this poem's wild and unpredictable lines without worrying about meter. The poem's loose shape, of course, is no accident: it mirrors the uncertainties the immigrants face both on the journey to England and once they're ashore, trying to survive in their new country. A regular meter might sound too organized and official, and wouldn't capture the chaos and danger of these undocumented immigrants' lives.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      "Look We Have Coming to Dover!" doesn't use a rhyme scheme: a tight pattern of rhymes would read too neatly, and wouldn't reflect the many uncertainties of immigrant life. Instead, the poem plays with sound through devices like alliteration and assonance.

      For instance, take a look at the dense repeating sounds in lines 16-18:

      Swarms of us, grafting in
      the black within shot of the moon’s
      spotlight, banking on the miracle of sun —

      All that alliteration and assonance gives these lines an almost claustrophobic feeling, evoking the immigrants' fear and stress as they live clandestine lives, hiding from the English authorities.

  • “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” Speaker

    • The poem's speaker is an immigrant who makes the journey across the English Channel to Dover in the hope of starting a new life. While the first two stanzas deal with this particular risky voyage, the poem later zooms out to discuss the immigrant experience more generally—its pitfalls, its hopes and dreams. The speaker seems optimistic about their new life, but the poem is so drenched in irony that it's hard to take the poem's closing visions of a cheerfully wealthy future at face value.

      The speaker's lively, attentive, creative personality comes through in their inventive vocabulary. In each line, the speaker coins words—and clangs words together—like some kind of 21st-century Shakespeare, playing with the English language in all sorts of lively and unusual ways. The speaker throws in, not just British slang, but words like "alfresco" (Italian) and "blarnies" (Irish), as well as words of Indian origin, and nouns turned into verbs. Through the speaker, the poem undermines the idea that there is one true English language, or English way of life, or even England—and reminds the reader that all of these are in constant flux, and all the richer for the contributions of those that make their lives in "Britannia."

  • “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” Setting

    • As the title promises, the poem is set (at first) in Dover, a town on England's south-eastern coast. Famous for its white cliffs, Dover has been one of the country's main gateways for thousands of years. The Dover Strait is the narrowest part of the Channel (the body of water between England and France), making it a key passage to and from the European mainland for travelers both official and undocumented.

      By setting the action here, Nagra grounds the poem in the controversial reality of modern-day Dover, which is still a place where many undocumented immigrants secretly arrive. At the beginning of the poem, the environment itself seems hostile to the immigrants (e.g. the "thunder" and "yobbish rain" in lines 9 and 10), anticipating the kind of response they might get further inland over the years.

      And in fact, much of the rest of the poem describes the hostility the immigrants face as they try to make lives in the UK. Appropriately enough, the poem never tells readers exactly where the immigrants end up, a choice that gestures to the fearful secrecy of their new lives.

      Dover is also the setting of Matthew Arnold's poem, "Dover Beach," from which this poem's epigraph is taken. Arnold's speaker stands ashore, fearing that the world is shifting away from Christianity—in other words, the world beyond England seems threatening. Here, that perspective is reversed, and England itself takes on a sinister atmosphere.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “Look We Have Coming to Dover!”

      Literary Context

      "Look We Have Coming to Dover!" is the title poem is from British poet Daljit Nagra's award-winning 2007 debut collection. Nagra's book won widespread acclaim for its inventive wordplay, its wit, and its ability to tackle complex subjects like Britishness, immigration, and identity.

      Many of the poems in this collection draw on Nagra's own background. Though he himself was born in England, his parents immigrated to Britain from India in the 1950s, and poems like "Singh Song!" explore cross-sections of British and Indian identity. The title of this poem (and the collection) is also grounded in allusions to other British writers: it's a play on W.H. Auden's "Look, Stranger!" and D.H. Lawrence's "Look! We Have Come Through!"

      But the clearest influence on "Look We Have Coming to Dover!" is a much earlier poem: Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." Arnold was a Victorian poet, and his speaker looks out to sea from the cliffs of Dover with melancholy and foreboding, fretting about what the world—particularly the western, Christian world—is becoming. This sentiment is not far removed from some of the reasoning behind anti-immigration rhetoric, which often suggests that an influx of new immigrants can erode a country's given culture or way of life. Nagra's poem reverses that perspective, with a speaker who looks towards England, not away from it, presenting an optimistic (if perhaps ironic) take on the country's future.

      Historical Context

      When Nagra wrote this poem, Tony Blair was Prime Minister of the UK; his government was known (perhaps not altogether justifiably) as friendly to immigrants. When the poem's speaker imagines being "Blair'd in the cash / of our beeswax'd cars," perhaps the allusion suggests hope for a comfortable life in a welcoming England. But immigration was and remains a much-contested issue in England, and it's one with a long and complex history. In truth, England—and the UK more generally—is a country produced by the forces of immigration (and, in its earlier history, invasion).

      The poem's dazzling display of linguistic invention testifies to the fact that English is a particularly wild and complex language, the product of multiple peoples and eras: the Romans, the Normans, the Anglo-Saxons, post-war emigrants from the Commonwealth, and so on. That evolving language also reflects an evolving population, shaped and reshaped by invasions and large-scale immigrations across thousands of years. Any attempt to precisely define Englishness (especially in an exclusionary way) usually falls apart pretty quickly!

      Dover has always been at the forefront (or shore-front) of the country's changes, which is why Matthew Arnold set his poem on its cliffs, and why Daljit Nagra does the same. The strange, sparky English of Nagra's poem suggests that a close-minded, hostile view of immigrants fails to acknowledge the way that immigration has always shaped and reshaped the English language—and England itself.

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