PEOPLE ETCETERA People are lovely to touch— A nice warm sloppy tilting belly Happy in its hollow of pelvis Like a bowl of porridge. People are fun to notice— Their eyes taking off like birds Away from their words To settle on breasts and ankles Irreverent as pigeons. People are good to smell— Leathery, heathery, culinary or Chanel, Lamb’s wool, sea­salt, linen dried in the wind, Skin fresh out of a shower. People are delicious to taste— Crisp and soft and tepid as new­made bread, Tangy as blackberries, luscious as avocado, Native as milk, Acrid as truth. People are irresistible to draw— Hand following hand, Eye outstaring eye, Every curve an experience of self, Felt weight of flesh, tension of muscle And all the geology of an elderly face. Are people easy to write about? Don’t say it. What are these shadows Vanishing Round the Corner? Elma Mitchell (1919­2000) WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THE POEM? The poem is about people and how they can be described and understood through the use of the senses: firstly touch, then sight, then smell, then taste and finally sight again, but this time drawing them. There are a series of images to capture the different sensations we receive of people. Some of these images are comic like in ​
the first stanza​
comparing a ‘sloppy tilting belly’ to ‘a bowl of porridge’. The ​
second stanza​
suggests that some people look on certain parts of the human body of others such as ‘breasts and ankles’ meaning the gaze could be sexual. In the ​
third stanza​
there are more comic images of people smelling of the kitchen ‘culinary’ or of expensive perfume ‘Chanel’. The ​
fourth stanza​
has a range of taste sensations with the qualities of bread, fruit and milk. The ​
fifth stanza​
shows a possible artist, like the poet, drawing all the bodily aspects of people We do get to know people initially through our senses. It is in ​
the final stanza​
that the speaker asks the question (to an unknown listener) about whether it is easy to write about people and concludes that people are shadows and elusive to understanding. We can never really know them. People can never be fully captured or understood which might be what artists try to do in their work. WHAT ARE THE MAIN THEMES AND IDEAS? ­The variety of human beings ­How we know people­ at first by the senses ­Superficial nature of human beings. We can never really know other people. WHAT ARE THE MAIN ASPECTS OF STYLE WHICH ARE EFFECTIVE? The first five stanzas begin with the same phrase ‘people are’ which gives a sense of a list. There are a wide variety of similes and metaphors to capture the variety of human beings, some of them ordinary, some exotic, some sexual and some just comic. The final stanza has shorter lines because the certainty of knowing people is fading and vanishing.