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Summary Gr 12 Poetry - "What Life is really like"
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What life is really likeby
Beverly Rycroft
, About the poet
Beverly Rycroft (South Africa) was born in 1959 in Stutterheim,
Eastern Cape, and she now lives in Cape Town with her family.
She is a graduate of the University of Cape Town and the University
of the Witwatersrand. She worked as a teacher for several years
before turning full time to writing and journalism. Her articles have
been published widely both locally and internationally. Her debut
poetry collection, missing, won the 2012 Ingrid Jonker award. In
she was awarded the Thomas Pringle Prize for best poem in a
journal.
In 1997 Beverly Rycroft was diagnosed with stage three breast
cancer. The themes of the poems in her debut collection, missing,
relate to the experience of facing mortality, illness and the hope of
recovery.
Our poem deals with the poet’s relationship with her father, a
university lecturer, who feels that she should know that the world
is not a kind place, and that she should “toughen up”. To “teach”
her about life, he wants to involve her in experiences that show
suffering, pain and death. However, the father becomes more
reflective, silent, when faced with her own suffering with breast
cancer.
, SUMMARY OF POEM
The poet remembers how her father would try to toughen her up
in order to face the inevitable difficulties that life would bring her.
He tells her that he “ought” to make her face the reality of a
chicken having its head chopped off. He makes her hold an
injured pigeon as he helps it. He tell her that life is a fight for
survival and that she, the poet, must be ready to deal with
whatever life throws at her. The poet waits for her father’s
prediction to come true – that there will be something hard with
which she will have to deal. It eventually comes in the form of
breast cancer. When she comes home from hospital, her father
is there to gently dress her wounds and look after her. He never
speaks of the lessons that he tried to teach her as she is now
living out the lessons that have prepared her to meet her own
fight for survival.
, STANZA 1 1
2
You need to toughen up
my father would complain
3 when I was small
4 I ought to take you to see
5 chickens having their heads
6 chopped off.
7 That’d teach you
8 what life is really like.
STANZA 2 9 He’d seek me out
10 when one of his pigeons
11 -crazed for home or
12 mad with terror from a
13 roaming hawk –
14 would tumble into
15 the loft
16 mutilated by
17 wire or beak.
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