Stabat Mater - Sam Hunt

Message: how people change through time and age and power dynamics within marriage. A reflective and autobiographical poem.

Context: published in 1973. Hunt = New Zealand’s best known poet. Autobiographical, his father and mother had a 30 year age gap, father was 60 when Hunt was born.

Title: Stabat Mater translates directly to mother standing. It is also the title o a medieval Christian hymn, where mother Mary watches Christ die on the cross.

Voice and tone: the choice of narrator amplifies the detachment between characters. The fact that the child didn’t find out about his parent’s old estranged relationship until he found it himself, and the mother’s unwillingness to talk about it shows the distance in their relationship.

Form, meter and rhyme:

  • Shakespearean sonnet - 3 quatrains and a rhyming couplet

  • Iambic pentameter

  • Sonnets associated with love - the mothers love for her family, and implicitly the sons love and respect for his mother

  • Rhyming couplet contains VOLTA, shift from focus on parents to poets internal thoughts

  • Small Volta at the start of verse 3 - shows shift from past to present

  • Irregular A B A C rhyming pattern

Language:

First stanza: the language used is very formal - my mother/my father/mr hunt/inscribed, unsettling being to the poem, considering the topic is marriage (meant to be a happy union). This is made further unsettling by the fact that the speaker is a child. The fricative alliteration Father/First Few demonstrates the tension within the marriage. While for many the first few years of marriage are the happiest, this is not the case for Hunt’s mother. Lots of punctuation, slows the story down, the poet wants us to take in his words.

Second stanza: the enjambment throughout the stanza mirrors the mother’s embarrassed tone, she is rushing to get through the story, an uncomfortable tone. Sibilance at the end of stanza adds to the inferior feeling of the mother Seem So Small. The language throughout is more colloquial, there is not much poetic language although it remains more formal. Establishes a ‘story-like’ form.

Third stanza:Now at the start of the stanza signals a small volta. Both the time and the tone have shifted, from past to present, from meek to confident. The language also slightly shifts from factual to more whimsical or literary (could reflect the progression of age on our presentation of ourselves) instead of learned/inscribed/explained its now roams/a game etc, the form is not so tight anymore. Elipses at the end are ambiguous, hints that the mother may suffer more then she lets on.

Rhyming couplet:‘I stand up straight’ - this is a mirroring of the title, shows the son has watched the mother and knows there will be a time in his life when he too has to watch someone he loves suffer. May also connote growing up.

Other messages: Hunt communicates the detachment between the young and elderly throughout the poem, but also shows the pain of watching a loved one suffer in old age. Hunt also conveys the lengths his mother went to conceal her true pain and suffering from her son ‘as if it were a game’. The final lines of the poem show some sense of regret, the mother regrets marrying his father but cannot go back because her decision has been made -therefore this is a warning to Hunt.

The Poem: