Spirit Too Blunt An Instrument

Question 1

Context

Answer 1

Born England 1933
Studied music and languages in uni
Began to lose hearing so became writer instead

Question 2

Stanza 1

Answer 2

Readers might picture the speaker holding their own baby as they marvel at the “intricate” perfection of the child’s body, which the poem presents as akin to a carefully crafted work of art. The “spirit” is like a hammer or dull knife clumsily thwacking away at a block of marble or wood; the creation of something as delicate and detailed as an infant requires much more dexterity and finesse than the spirit can muster.

Question 3

Stanza 2

Answer 3

Alliteration also emphasizes the intricate connections within the body. For example, notice how the phrase “miniature to minute” evokes the way the cartilage of the ear curves inward, like the concentric revolutions of a seashell, getting smaller and smaller closer to the ear canal. The same sounds slip across the line as the words themselves shrink (moving from “miniature” to positively “minute”).

Question 4

Stanza 2 part 2

Answer 4

lliteration also overlaps with consonance and assonance. Together, these devices make the poem sound richly musical and memorable, and they also evoke the images being described. Just listen to the crisp /t/ and /k/ sounds in the phrase “intricate exacting particulars”; the sharp, quick consonance itself feels intricate, exacting, and particular.

Question 5

Stanza 3

Answer 5

Finally, notice all the plosive /p/ alliteration in the poem’s closing stanza: “passion,” “possessed,” “practice, “perfectly,” “precision.” These sounds evoke the speaker’s biting tone: they seem to be almost sneering at “passion” and “sentiment,” which compared to biology are clumsy and inaccurate and impossible to understand.
•These lines explain that no human affection could have created the baby as accurately as it has been by habit of nature. It says that nature can create such beauty and perfection, with no effort at all because it has “practiced” and works through habit, rather than the lack of precision the spirit possesses.

Question 6

Summary

Answer 6

The poem’s speaker marvels at the incredible complexities of a newborn baby’s body, something that, the speaker muses, could only have been created through “indifferent” and “ignorant” biological processes. The speaker contrasts this clean yet unfeeling scientific perfection with the painful messiness of “human passions,” ultimately suggesting that it’s both things—precise biology and the “vagaries” of the mind—that make human beings human