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Poem Of The Week: The Old Pantry By Peter Scupham (1933-2022)

The Old Pantry

Sun angles for a perch of glass,
Cups alight on their scroll hooks.

Life transfers to bone china
Her sparkling buds and lustres.

Oilcloth glistens to cut scraps of light,
A dimmed or glittering stillness,

But from the dark, the recessed silence,
White food floats dim surfaces.

Anchored at the pitcher’s rim, a ladle
Swings a gleam over sweet milk,

Sugar crumbles a cold silver-sand,
New-baked bread swells under damp cloths.

An underworld, bleached and dumb,
Reaching into this fresh wash of air.

Image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Peter Scupham’s delicious poem is a rich confection, a cluttered inventory of crockery and tempting foodstuffs. As it cleaves towards the sunlight, the narrator animates the tableau, as if the pantry’s accoutrements were resettling into a position of wholesome goodness.

Scupham’s seductive use of metaphor and steady rhythm enables a sense of kinetic apprehension; the lustrous china, the gleaming ladle, the crumbling sugar and the swelling bread are actuated as though towards a kind of perfection. The received effect is synaesthesial; the poet’s masterful conjunction of sensory elements is an admitting of light, of freshness, the first ‘wash’ of day.

‘The Old Pantry’ is taken from The Hinterland, published by Oxford University Press (1977)

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