1. Bread
Brendan Kennelly

2. This poem reflects on how to nurture a person.
It features one of the great opening lines in modern Irish poetry: “Someone else cut off my head / in a golden field.”
This is an ironic kind of violence, however, as death in the field leads to life in the kitchen.
The wheat then narrates its journey from field to kitchen to oven to stomach.

3. As it does so, it takes on many symbolic meanings.
Kennelly uses wheat as a metaphor to describe human life.
“Now I am recreated / by her fingers,” he continues, as the first stanza leads into the second in a short, punchy rhythm, which is maintained throughout the poem.

4. Students must consider the identity of the female character identified in the second stanza.
It is widely thought to be Kennelly’s mother or grandmother, but there are strong sexual undertones to much of the imagery.
This view gains credence when we notice the sensuousness of the language – time and again Kennelly returns to the image of hands at work: “This / Moulding is more delicate / Than a first kiss,”
This draws an affectionate comparison from the humdrum kneading of bread dough while also underlining the sense of a person being formed by the woman’s actions.

5. He expands on this with another simile, describing her breathing in a way which compliments the sensuous language used to describe the earlier kiss: “More deliberate than her own / Rising up / And lying down.”
Students come to see the process of bread- making as a caring and loving act, and we are aware now that a person is being nurtured too.

6. Indeed, Kennelly shows a love which borders on reverence for the woman.
He uses a seductive sibilance to write admiringly of her effect on him: “I am nothing till / She runs her fingers through me / And shapes me with her skill.”
Regardless of her identity , the woman is at once delicate and forthright (honest), and Kennelly certainly considers her a fundamental influence in his life.

7. The sense of nurturing is enhanced when the wheat “Grows round and white” – an image which may speak of pregnancy.
We are then jolted away from this world of love and care when the woman is described in violent terms: “It seems I comfort her / Even as she slits my face / And stabs my chest”.
Kennelly uses alliteration to portray her as clinical and deliberate.
The reader must consider how the woman could take comfort from causing the poet so much pain.

8. And yet for all the pain implied, the poet is satisfied that it is worth it: “so I am glad to go through fire / And come out / Shaped like her dream.”
His willing tone implies that he finds this sacrifice of love a worthy one.
Its pain is compensated with satisfying rewards.

9. Even with this love I noticed an absence of the speaker’s / poet’s free will – he is living according to someone else’s idea of him; he is being shaped by someone else and finds nothing objectionable in that.
“In my way / I am all that can happen to men” reinforces the idea that he is subject to forces beyond his control.
The final two lines offer a lot for me to ponder – the poet seems to have been created and destroyed by the same person.