Darling Summary & Analysis
by Jackie Kay

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  • “Darling” Introduction

    • "Darling" is Jackie Kay's elegy for her close friend Julia Darling. In it, the poet/speaker recalls keeping watch by her dying friend's bedside. Though frustrated that she can't remember all the precise details of her friend's appearance, voice, etc., the simple act of remembrance helps her feel more connected to the person she's lost. In fact, she argues that her friend hasn't "really gone" and that the dead never "go till [we] do"—because their spirits linger with us, because our memories keep them alive, or both. What begins as a description of profound loss ends as a vision of profound connection. "Darling" appears as the title poem of Jackie Kay's Darling: New & Selected Poems (2007).

  • “Darling” Summary

    • After someone dies, you may start to forget certain things about her—like precisely what her voice was like, or the way her face looked while she was asleep. You may forget how she sounded when she was softly crying, curled up into a crescent shape; when, shrunken from her usual size by illness, she seemed dead before she actually died; when the trees outside were in bloom, the sun shone, and everything on earth looked pleasant.

      I held my friend's hand and sang her a song from childhood, the "Mingulay Boat Song," which begins, "Heel y'ho boys, let her go boys." By the time I fell silent, my friend was gone—as if skipping away, a tiny child again, at ease and with a kind of smile on her face.

      What I didn't realize or notice at the time was that she hadn't actually left. The people we've lost don't actually leave till we die, my loves. They're still right here with us.

  • “Darling” Themes

    • Theme Grief, Love, and Memory

      Grief, Love, and Memory

      Jackie Kay's "Darling" grapples with the loss of a loved one (the poet's close friend, Julia Darling). From reflections on the difficulty of remembering the deceased, it moves on to memories of her friend's death and, finally, to a reassurance that the dead in some sense never leave us at all. Instead, in the speaker's view, the people we miss linger in our presence, comforting us invisibly.

      The poem suggests that the hardest aspect of grief is the loss of memory: we can never remember the dead exactly as they were. The speaker says that, for example, "You might forget the exact sound of [your loved one's] voice / Or how her face looked when sleeping." When close friends and family members die, the particulars of their appearance, voice, and so on start to fade, compounding the difficulty of the loss.

      Even as the speaker acknowledges forgetting these specifics, the poem recalls her friend’s dying moments—and suggests that this effort to remember helps link us with those we've lost. At first, the speaker narrates her friend's death scene in purely grim terms. The friend is "Curled" up "weeping" and has grown significantly "smaller" (presumably, in her illness). Meanwhile, the weather is cheerful in a way that seems cruelly ironic: "the blossom was on the trees / And the sun was out, and all seemed good in the world."

      For the friend, of course, all seems awful. And for the speaker, the contrast between inside and outside adds to the bitterness of losing her friend. Yet after the speaker sings a song from her childhood, the friend looks more peaceful; as she dies, she looks like "a girl again, skipping off, / Her heart light, her face almost smiling." The speaker, too, seems less anguished: her song contains the words "let her go," and she seems to follow its advice. Afterward, just as the speaker comforts her friend, memories of the friend comfort the grieving speaker. Though the specifics may grow faint, the memory of loved ones remains soothing and creates a presence in their absence.

      Finally, the speaker reassures readers that, in some sense, their loved ones never leave them. The dead remain beside us until we, too, die—because they live on as spirits and/or because our own thoughts and memories keep them with us. The speaker frames her own grief as a kind of spiritual misunderstanding: "what I didn't know or couldn't see then," she says, is that her friend "hadn't really gone." Moreover, she assures readers that "The dead don't go till you do"; rather, "The dead are still here holding our hands." This statement might reflect a spiritual/religious view of the afterlife. In other words, perhaps her friend no longer feels absent because her spirit lingers in a literal sense. Alternatively, the speaker may be suggesting that the presence of the dead in memory (however imperfect) keeps them with us in a metaphorical sense.

      Either way, the elegy is a consoling one. It promises readers that our losses are bearable, or even a kind of illusion, because our loved ones are never truly gone.

      Where this theme appears in the poem:
      • Lines 1-16
  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Darling”

    • Lines 1-4

      You might forget ...
      ... a half moon,

      The speaker of "Darling" begins by speaking in the second person: "You might forget the exact sound of her voice." As the poem goes on it, it becomes clear that she is addressing herself. She has lost someone close to her and fears she'll "forget" important details about the person's identity: "the exact sound of her voice / or how her face looked when sleeping."

      The body of the poem never identifies this person directly, but the title provides a clue. As Jackie Kay has acknowledged, "Darling" is an elegy for her close friend Julia Darling: a UK poet, novelist, and playwright who died of breast cancer at age 48. Of course, there's also a second meaning here: the lost friend is very darling or dear to the poet.

      The first two sentences of the poem begin with the same phrase: "You might forget the exact sound of her voice [...] You might forget the sound of her quiet weeping." This repetition (specifically, anaphora) is a way of layering on detail as the poet creates her portrait. And it's a deathbed portrait: "Darling" depicts its subject in the last days and moments of her life, a time marked by lots of "sleeping," "quiet weeping," and pain. The pain and distress are so intense, in fact, that Darling weeps while "curled into the shape of a half moon": basically, curled up in the fetal position. Though the poet is afraid to "forget" these details, she presents them vividly, so that the poem becomes a memorial tribute and a stay against forgetting.

    • Lines 5-7

      when smaller than ...
      ... in the world.

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    • Lines 8-12

      I held her ...
      ... face almost smiling.

    • Lines 13-16

      And what I ...
      ... holding our hands.

  • “Darling” Symbols

    • Symbol The Blossoming Trees and Sun

      The Blossoming Trees and Sun

      In "Darling," the poet's friend dies on a sunny spring day. (The real-life Julia Darling died in mid-April 2005.) The poet/speaker recalls that "the blossom was on the trees / and the sun was out, and all seemed good in the world."

      The sunny weather and blossoming spring trees play a symbolic role here. They represent the way the world moves on—does not change or pause its usual cycles—in response to individual tragedy. At first, as the friend lies "weeping," this continuity seems ironic and harsh; later, as the friend dies "almost smiling," it seems healthy and natural. The blossoms might also suggest some hope of life or renewal after death, especially given that the poem ends, "The dead are still here holding our hands."

      Where this symbol appears in the poem:
      • Lines 6-7: “when the blossom was on the trees / and the sun was out, and all seemed good in the world.”
  • “Darling” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Repetition

      The poem uses repetition, and especially anaphora, at several key moments. In fact, both of the poem's first two sentences begin with the same phrase:

      You might forget the exact sound of her voice
      or how her face looked when sleeping.
      You might forget the sound of her quiet weeping
      curled into the shape of a half moon,

      The repetition has a simple effect: emphasizing memory/forgetting as a key theme of the poem. The speaker's inability to remember Darling's voice and appearance "exact[ly]" is part of what moves her to write this elegy—to memorialize her friend as best she can.

      The speaker also uses anaphora and parallelism as a way of layering on detail, as in line 7 ("and the sun was out, and all seemed good in the world") and line 12 ("her heart light, her face almost smiling"). Notice how the phrase "her face," from line 2, reappears in line 12, as the speaker continues trying to evoke the person she's lost.

      The final example of anaphora comes in the last two lines:

      The dead don’t go till you do, loved ones.
      The dead are still here holding our hands.

      Each of these parallel phrases begins a sentence with the weight of its own line. The result sounds emphatic and conclusive, as the poet ringingly affirms that "The dead" live on with us.

      Where repetition appears in the poem:
      • Line 1: “You might forget the,” “sound of her”
      • Line 2: “her face”
      • Line 3: “You might forget the,” “sound of her”
      • Line 7: “and,” “and”
      • Line 12: “her,” “her face”
      • Line 15: “The dead”
      • Line 16: “The dead”
    • Juxtaposition

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      Where juxtaposition appears in the poem:
      • Lines 1-12
    • Allusion

      Where allusion appears in the poem:
      • Lines 8-9: “I held her hand and sang a song from when I was a girl— / Heel y'ho boys, let her go boys / —”
    • Sibilance

      Where sibilance appears in the poem:
      • Line 1: “sound,” “voice”
      • Line 2: “face,” “sleeping”
      • Line 3: “sound”
      • Line 4: “shape”
      • Line 5: “smaller,” “self,” “she seemed”
      • Line 6: “she,” “blossom”
      • Line 7: “sun,” “seemed”
      • Line 8: “sang,” “song”
      • Line 10: “stopped singing she,” “slipped”
      • Line 11: “slip,” “skipping”
      • Line 12: “face almost smiling”
      • Line 13: “see”
      • Line 14: “she”
      • Line 16: “still”
  • “Darling” 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.

    • Heel y'ho boys, let her go boys
    • A slip of a girl
    Heel y'ho boys, let her go boys
    • (Location in poem: Lines 9-9: “Heel y'ho boys, let her go boys / —”)

      Words from the "Mingulay Boat Song," a Scottish song from the 1930s pairing modern lyrics with a traditional tune.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Darling”

    • Form

      "Darling" consists of four quatrains (four-line stanzas). It's written in free verse, meaning it has no regular meter or rhyme scheme.

      This fairly loose form adds to the poem's conversational tone. The quatrains add some overall structure, and there are a couple of flashes of rhyme ("sleeping"/"weeping" in lines 2-3, plus the internal rhyme of the song lyric in line 9), but otherwise, the language has a very natural flow to it. This style fits the speaker's candid reminiscence about a friend. It makes even more sense once the speaker addresses readers directly (as "loved ones") in lines 15-16: here, it's as if she's right in the room with us, offering reassurance.

    • Meter

      As a free verse poem, "Darling" has no regular meter. Its style is relaxed and conversational, capturing both the casual intimacy of friendship and the plain reality of death. There's no dramatic variation in line length, but there's enough (between 8 and 15 syllables per line) to keep the language from settling into a rhythm.

      Of course, line 9, which quotes a snippet of old song lyrics, has a consistent beat to it ("Heel y'ho boys, let her go boys"). This strong trochaic meter (DUM-da, DUM-da rhythm) stands out powerfully amid the free verse.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      "Darling" is a free verse poem, so it has no rhyme scheme—though it does contain one notable instance of end rhyme. Lines 2 and 3 rhyme, perhaps setting up the expectation that rhyme will continue throughout the poem:

      You might forget the exact sound of her voice
      or how her face looked when sleeping.
      You might forget the sound of her quiet weeping

      Instead, the poem is rhyme-free thereafter (aside from the internal rhyme in line 9: "Heel y'ho boys, let her go boys"). This might be the poet's way of invoking, then rejecting a highly "poetic" style. That is, she might be gesturing toward a formal structure, then abandoning it as the messiness of death and grief takes over.

  • “Darling” Speaker

    • Jackie Kay has stated in public comments that she is the speaker of "Darling." The poem is an elegy for her close friend, the UK poet and novelist Julia Darling (1956-2005), who died of breast cancer in her late forties. Kay has explained that Darling inspired her not only through her work but through her courage and humor during her illness.

      In the poem itself, the poet/speaker recalls her friend's death and grapples with the loss. While sitting by Darling's deathbed, she "sang a song" that seemed to comfort Darling in her final moments. In turn, the memory of Darling (or perhaps her spiritual presence) comforted the poet as she mourned. The poet either believes in an afterlife or feels that the memories of loved ones, however "[in]exact," provide genuine comfort: "The dead are still here holding our hands."

  • “Darling” Setting

    • The setting here is the room in which the poet's friend (Julia Darling) died. Almost certainly, it's a hospital room, although the poet/speaker never specifies this.

      Weather is an important aspect of the setting. The friend died on a pleasant spring day, when "the sun was out" and "the blossom was on the trees." (Julia Darling in fact passed away on April 13, 2005.) The day was so pretty that "all seemed good in the world." At first, the juxtaposition between the friend's deathbed and the glorious weather seems bitterly ironic. By the end, however, it seems strangely fitting: the dying friend relaxes into a peaceful, "almost smiling" state, and the speaker imagines her "skipping off" with her "heart light" as a child's. In other words, the weather and the poem's emotional atmosphere seem aligned.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “Darling”

      Literary Context

      Acclaimed poet Jackie Kay was born in 1961 to Scottish and Nigerian parents. She was subsequently adopted and grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, and she wrote about these experiences in her debut poetry collection, The Adoption Papers (1991). She has published numerous books, won several awards, and served from 2016 to 2021 as the Makar (a.k.a the Poet Laureate of Scotland). "Darling" appears as the title poem of her 2007 collection, Darling: New & Selected Poems.

      Kay describes two main sets of influences on her writing: Scottish poetry and jazz/blues music. As a child, for example, she attended traditional Burns Night celebrations, which celebrate the work of Scottish poetry legend Robert Burns. As an adult, she would visit the leading Scottish poet Edwin Morgan in his nursing home to discuss poetry. Kay published a biography about the great blues and jazz singer Bessie Smith in 1997, and her book Other Lovers (1993) includes a sequence about Smith as well.

      Kay was formerly in a long-term relationship with Carol Ann Duffy, another major voice in contemporary poetry in the UK. Both poets use humor and surprising imagery to explore themes related to desire, identity, and womanhood.

      Historical Context

      The poem doesn't make much reference to historical events, but lines 8-9 do allude to a popular Scottish folk song from the 1930s: the "Mingulay Boat Song," by Sir Hugh S. Roberton. The song's lyrics tell of fishermen sailing home to the island of Mingulay, in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.

      More importantly, the poem refers to a significant event in the poet's own life: the death of her "very dear friend," English novelist and poet Julia Darling (1956-2005). Kay has described Darling, who died of breast cancer at age 48, as a "woman poet who was a huge influence to" her, both through her work and through her courage during her final illness. Kay has also said that her poem "honors anybody, really, who's lost anybody."

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