the lost woman patricia beer

1. TheLostWomanby Patricia Beer
by Mati, Tin and Juan

2. Poem:
My mother went with no more warning
than a bright voice and a bad pain.
Home from school on a June morning
And where the brook goes under the lane
I saw the back of a shocking white
Ambulance drawing away from the gate.
She never returned and I never saw
Her buried. So a romance began.
The ivy-mother turned into a tree
That still hops away like a rainbow down
The avenue as I approach.
My tendrils are the ones that clutch.
I made a life for her over the years.
Frustrated no more by a dull marriage
She ran a canteen through several wars.
The wit of a cliché-ridden village
She met her match at an extra-mural
Class and the OU summer school.
Many a hero in his time
And every poet has acquired
A lost woman to haunt the home,
To be compensated and desired,
Who will not alter, who will not grow,
A corpse they need never get to know.
She is nearly always benign. Her habit
Is not to stride at dead of night.
Soft and crepuscular in rabbit-
Light she comes out. Hear how they hate
Themselves for losing her as they did.
But my lost woman evermore snaps
From somewhere else: “You did not love me.
I sacrificed too much perhaps,
I showed you the way to rise above me
And you took it. You are the ghost
With the bat-voice, my dear. I am not lost”

3. Stanza1
My mother went with no more warning
than a bright voice and a bad pain.
Home from school on a June morning
And where the brook goes under the lane
I saw the back of a shocking white
Ambulance drawing away from the gate.
Analysis:
-The voice is in first person
and she (Patricia Beer)
narrates what happened
when her mother died.
-She says that her mother left
without saying her goodbye.
-She also tells her experience
when her mother died and
when she sees the brook,
she describes the moment
when the ambulance took her
mother that unfortunately
died.
Vocabulary
Brook: a small natural stream of fresh water.
Gate: movable barrier

4. Stanza2
She never returned and I never saw
Her buried. So a romance began.
The ivy-mother turned into a tree
That still hops away like a rainbow down
The avenue as I approach.
My tendrils are the ones that clutch.
Analysis:
The first line tell us that the child
has never spoken or seen her
mother after she was taken by the
ambulance. She didn't see her
mother's burial, that it means that
she is dead.
The ivi-mother is turned into a tree
can represents that she was
growing and when she passed
away she rose and was happier for
growing with her.
Vocabulary
Hops: to move quickly as if jumping
Tendril: threadlike stem of climbing plants that
twines round another body, so as to support the
plant.
Clutch: synonym of hold.

5. Stanza3
I made a life for her over the years.
Frustrated no more by a dull marriage
She ran a canteen through several wars.
The wit of a cliché-ridden village
She met her match at an extra-mural
Class and the OU summer school.
Vocabulary
Dull: boring
Wit: clever humor/quick thinking/good sense
Cliché-ridden village: ordinary town
OU: Open University
Analysis:
The narrator creates an
imagery of how would have
been the life of the mother if
she hadn't died. This shows
that the woman and her
mother had a very close
relationship and it shows
these visions were very real
for her (“I made a life for her
over the years”).

6. Stanza4
Many a hero in his time
And every poet has acquired
A lost woman to haunt the home,
To be compensated and desired,
Who will not alter, who will not grow,
A corpse they need never get to know.
Analysis:
-In this stanza the narrator says that
everybody has lost a woman at one
point in our lives. That woman could
be someone that you knew all your
life, like a mother or grandmother or
could be someone that we barely
know.
-The readers are invited to imagine
the feeling of losing a woman, such
as a sister or a girlfriend, while
simultaneously making them realize
that they don’t just haunt the home,
but the life as well.
Vocabulary
Corpse: dead body

7. Stanza5
She is nearly always benign. Her habit
Is not to stride at dead of night.
Soft and crepuscular in rabbit-
Light she comes out. Hear how they
hate
Themselves for losing her as they did.
Analysis:
The narrator explains
her imaginations and
feelings about her
mother. We can see
how after a long time
the mother is still in the
narrator's thoughts.
Vocabulary
Benign: not malignant
Crepuscular: resembling twilight, indistinct

8. Stanza6
But my lost woman evermore snaps
From somewhere else: “You did not
love me.
I sacrificed too much perhaps,
I showed you the way to rise above me
And you took it. You are the ghost
With the bat-voice, my dear. I am not
lost”
Analysis:
This final paragraph contradicts all ideas
created by the reader; instead, the truth
is revealed.
-Also the mother is saying that perhaps
she sacrificed so much that the narrator
never really knew that her mother would
eventually die and that she would be
without her.
-In this last stanza, the dead mother talks
to the daughter saying that she is not the
lost woman, that the daughter is the lost
one because she feels like she couldn't
live without her mother.
Vocabulary
Snaps: -to (cause to) make a sudden, sharp sound;
crack
-to move with quick motions of the body.

9. Themes: Death - Haunting - Lost - Women
Tone: Confusion - Tension - Sadness
Voice: The narrator is a girl who mother died
Six stanzas with six lines each.
It's narrated in First Person (“My mother went with no more warning)
Structure

10. AbouttheAuthor
“The lost Woman” was written by Patricia Beer. She was born
in 1919 in the UK and she died in 1999 being 80 years old.
When she was younger she experienced death when her mother
died, she was 14 that's why her main theme for her poems is
death. She was a poet, novelist, memoirist and she also was
a literary academic. She has her own autobiography called
“Mrs Beer's House”. For many years she taught literature in
many universities. She worked a lot with female novelists.

11. Patricia Beer

12. ShortAnalysis
The poem shows at the end that the daughter is really the ‘lost woman,’. The
Narrator also creates an imagery of the how mother’s life would have been if
she wouldn't have died. The speaker starts to create her own version of her
mother and the language changes slightly. The speaker creates an image of how
her mother met her husband in war. She also imagines her mother as something
better than she thought she was.
Message: Everybody has lost a woman in our lives.