These notes come from myself, who passed matric of 2023 with an overall average of 87% in each subject i took.
This document contains a full analysis of the prescribed Matric IEB poem: Touch by Hugh Lewin. The poem has been broken down and analysed line by line to ensure it is fully understood by ...
Author: Jailed for 7 years
Part of the ARM (African Resistant Movement)
Died at 79 (2019)
Stanza 1
When I get out: Speaker is currently in jail.
Gently and Slowly: Connotation of being affectionate, kind. A relationship where this
kind of "touch" exist, indicates trust and equality.
Line breaks (6-9): slows the poem down; breaks the sentence into phrases,
emphases the meaning/showing the speaker's struggle in uttering the words.
To learn again. how life feels: Speaker equates the touch of another human to life,
implying people need human contact so as not to lose their sense of being alive.
Depending on the type of "touch" humans receive, it can make them feel either
more of less of a human; or feel more or less alive.
Lines 2-9: Speaker says that when he is released he is going to ask someone to touch him
gently(unlike the manner in which he is "Touched" while being imprisoned). He is desperate
for gentle human contact which he associates with "life" (Line 9). Speaker is aware that he
touched gently, he will regain a desire for physical contact, which will bring him back to
"life" and this his morality and wellbeing.
Stanza 1: Stanza implies that he has been physically abused in prison. He does not
necessarily only want to be touched, but he also wants to feel "human" again.
Stanza 2
I've not been touched: the absence of touch and lack of contact with the outside
world has been torturous for him--this is evident from the different connotations of
the word "touch".
For seven years, for seven years: repetition emphasizes the repetitive nature of
being in prison and the length of his incarceration
Untouchable: Lewin has admitted that this sense of being "untouchable" does not
only refer to being unclean/an out case, but also to deserve those people who had to
carry a passbook which authorized their travel in south African during the apartheid
regime, as this in effect, imprisoned them in their own country. "untouchables" -
people in India who were considered to be of the lowest social caste (class). They
had lowly jobs and were no allowed to touch members of the higher ranked castes.
By being in prison, the speaker is barely recognized as being human.
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