'Look We Have Coming to Dover!' - Daljit Nagra

Title: “Look We Have Coming To Dover!”

immediate grammatical error → remains the title regardless

mixes the past + present tense → metaphorical of how the immigrant journey is a past/present mix…?

English as a second language

Dover Beach = site of previous militaristic invasion

speaker looks towards England, not outward at the sea

epigraph: “So various, so beautiful, so new…”

graphology = italics makes it clear that this is a separate person → upper classman with education, compared to immigrants?

anaphoric asyndeton = excess, and too much beauty → doesn’t really seem authentic → curated version of British identity?

Or perhaps more genuine? Nagra repurposes a remark from a classist British man, and interjects it into 21st century multiculturalism

“Stowed in the sea to invade / the alfresco lash of a diesel-breeze”

“Stowed” - immediately incriminated

“invade” = immigrants apply the language designated to them by racists to themselves…? weaponise themselves?

“alfresco lash of a diesel-breeze” → sensory overtake = alfresco meaning dining outside = a luxurious connotation that feels intentionally awkward

“diesel-breeze” = neologism, encapsulating the technocentric English world

“ratcheting speed into the tide”

forceful sounds → “into the tide” → the force is at one with nature

“gobfuls of surf phlegmed by cushy come-and-go”

feels sudden and violent

“gobfuls” = English dialect → English language fundamental to this poem, both in contents + the poetic language itself

“tourists prow’d on the cruisers, lording the ministered waves”

“prow’d” = homophonic instability, making them sound both proud + meaning → could be seen as the language masking the double opinions of the tourists

“lording the ministered waves” → hyper-control + gov. surveillance - “cruisers” - vehicular control

religious preaching almost?

the tourists have power over the waves, and bounce off them → for immigrants, waves can be deadly

stanzas look like…

waves → could show how the immigrant journey dictates their life well into settling down?

“Seagull and shoal life / vexing their blarnies”

• unusual words = dialect is used forcefully + purposefully - conveys the cacophonous seagulls?

  • strange use of language might suggest a new creativity applied to the English language from non-native speakers?

“camouflage past the vast crumble of scummed / cliffs, scramming on mulch”

double consonants - heaviness + burden?

“crumble of scummed cliffs” = the white cliffs of Dover as an iconic British identity, now being worn away → what does it mean to be British anyway?!

“

“thunder unbladders / yobbish rain and wind on our escape hutched in a Bedford van”

personifies the weather → possibly to represent British lack of support?

“yob” = English slang for someone rude

personification shows how British citizens harass immigrants

“hutched” = feels like a rabbit cage? speaker engages in the degrading language surrounding of immigration?

“Bedford vans” = classic image of cops and robbers → extremised image suggesting that immigrants are subhuman criminals merely for existing

“breeding like rabbits”

“Seasons or years we reap / inland”

• marks an important shift in setting - in both space and time

• “reap” = literal and metaphorical → labour that undocumented people are more likely to find? but they also reap years, losing their lives to trying to get documented!!

“unclocked by the national eye / or stabs in the back”

“national eye” = feels like a Big Brother surveillance → trying to keep under the radar, but are always in danger of physical + metaphorical “stabs in the back”

“national eye” = the media?

metonymic metaphor

“teemed for breathing / sweeps of grass through the whistling asthma of parks”

• immigrants painted as systemic ‘obstructions’

• impressionistic lines → poor healthcare?

• natural world → the immigrants are treated like they are a part of the setting, rather than people

  • enjambment between “breathing” and “sweeps” of grass enacts the division between the people + the natural world

“burdened, ennobled - poling sparks across pylon and pylon”

“pylon” = sounds like ‘pile on’ → a fight?

“sparks” = metaphorical tension?

immigrants = kind of unseen force that keeps the country running, like electricity →

“Swarms of us, grafting in / the black within shot of the moon’s / spotlight”

“swarms” = engages in animalistic language → dehumanised + dangerous invaders

“graft” = working hard in metaphorical darkness → labour in secrecy

“within shot” → constantly escaping the spotlight? alternatively, always working close to a romantic + dreamy spotlight, but never in the light!?

“banking on the miracle of sun — / span its rainbow, passport to life”

the immigrants want to be in the metaphorical light → hoping for a “miracle of sun” → or a “rainbow” ephemeral? near-magical?

“passport to life” = passport = powerful symbol of freedom → literally and figuratively → immigrants defined by their lack of British passports

dash after “sun” → creates a moment of hope for the immigrants, before crushing it

“Only then / can it be human to hoick ourselves, bare-faced for the clear”

• “hoick” = verb used for meat

• “bare-faced” = symbolic lack of hiding

  • “human” and “hoick” in quick succession - how easily people are animalised…?

“Imagine my love and I, our sundry others”

ends on a hopeful vision of the future

imagines being a legitimate English person - and middle class

“sundry others” = various other people

Arnold’s speaker turns towards his beloved, the speaker here imagines “my love and I” → Arnold expresses his want for togetherness against a frightening world, but Nagra imagines a brighter future

“Blair’d in the cash / of our beeswax’d cars”

contraction to ensure meter is less intact → malleability + fitting in?

“Blair’d” → direct product of Politics + aspirational figure

“Besswax’d cars” = cars that are well cared for and protected → shiny

cars in comparison to the “Bedford van” → new mode of movement + freedom?

repeated ‘ee’ sounnds

excess represents material abundance

“our crash clothes, free,. we raise our charged glasses over unparasol’d tables”

• symbolically speaking, they no longer need to hide in the metaphorical shadows

• can drink champagne freely

• “charged glasses” = energised + liberated?

“East, babbling our lingoes, flecked by the chalk of Britannia”

“babbling our lingoes” = idealistic world in which multiple dialects + sociolects are accepted?

“chalk of Britannia” → like the White Cliffs of Dover → what even is Britishness anyway…?

themes:

British identity

hidden economy

language

violence of patriotism

unsettling boundaries + thresholds