Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
First-person narration from the perspective of a father with a young boy.
Form and Meter
A near-sonnet using the standard meter of that form, iambic pentameter.
Metaphors and Similes
The nettles are termed the "regiment of spite behind the shed."
Alliteration and Assonance
Opening line: "My son aged three fell in the nettle bed" uses the assonance created by the "eh" sound in fell, nettle, and bed to link all three together into a succinct portrait of the initiating event.
Irony
After all the effort put into destroying the threat posed by the nettles, they ironically return fully formed just two weeks later.
Genre
Poetry
Setting
At an unidentified time in a house with a shed.
Tone
The speaker begins with a tone of protective anger that ultimately ends on a note of plaintive regret.
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: the father. Antagonist: the nettles.
Major Conflict
The poem commences with the conflict between the three-year-old boy and the nettles which the nettles win.
Climax
The story climaxes with the father burning the utterly defeated nettles.
Foreshadowing
The reference to the nettles as a "regiment" foreshadows the heavy use of military imagery during the climax.
Understatement
The poem ends on a note of understated realization that the father cannot protect his son: "My son would often feel sharp wounds again."
Allusions
The imagery throughout alludes to military jargon in the battle against the weeds: "A funeral pyre to burn the fallen dead."
Metonymy and Synecdoche
N/A
Personification
The weeds are personified as a sentient predatory threat: "not a nettle in that fierce parade / Stood upright any more"
Hyperbole
"I took my billhook, honed the blade / And went outside and slashed in fury with it" overstates the intensity required to cut down weeds.
Onomatopoeia
N/A
