Nettles — Vernon Scannell (1980)

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) was an English poet whose biography shaped much of his writing. He served in the Second World War, deserted, boxed professionally, and returned to poetry with an ear trained by both literary tradition and rough experience. Nettles, published in 1980, is a compact sixteen-line poem about an ordinary domestic incident — a child stung by nettles — told in language saturated with military imagery. The effect is at once tender and disturbing: a father's love for his son is rendered through the vocabulary of the battlefield.

The poem's brilliance lies in that mismatch. A father weeding a garden becomes a soldier; a patch of nettles becomes "a regiment". Scannell's war has followed him home.

Context

Aspect	Detail
Poet	Vernon Scannell (1922–2007)
Date	1980
Period	Contemporary
Form	Sixteen-line single stanza
Metre	Iambic pentameter
Rhyme	ABAB pattern

Scannell's war service is not the poem's direct subject, but it is the poem's atmosphere. He had written elsewhere about what the soldier brings home; this poem shows one way a father cannot quite put war down, even in his own garden.

Short summary

The speaker's three-year-old son has fallen into a bed of nettles and been stung. The boy is "sobbing". The father lifts and soothes him, then, "soothed him till his pain was a forgotten / Wound", takes a "slashing scythe" and cuts the nettles down. He burns the fallen nettles. Two weeks later, new shoots have come up. The poem closes on the recognition that his son will experience more stings in life, and that the father will not always be there to cut them down.

Voice and speaker

The speaker is the father, first-person, observant and quietly pained. The voice is controlled — the poem is only sixteen lines — but the care beneath the control is enormous. The father speaks with the economy of someone who is feeling more than he is saying.

Form and structure

Feature	Detail
Stanza	One, sixteen lines
Rhyme	ABAB alternating
Metre	Iambic pentameter
Movement	Incident → action → recognition

graph TD
  A[Son falls into nettles; sobs] --> B[Father soothes son]
  B --> C[Father attacks nettles with scythe]
  C --> D[Father burns them]
  D --> E[Two weeks later, regrowth]
  E --> F[Recognition of future pain]

The sixteen-line single-stanza form gives the poem the shape of a small ballad. The ABAB rhyme scheme is soft and even; the iambic pentameter is regular. The formal poise contrasts with the violence of the military vocabulary — another of the poem's productive tensions.

Language and imagery

Military vocabulary used for garden work. The nettles are "a regiment of spite" that mount "a fierce parade". The father attacks with a "slashing scythe". The fallen plants are a "fallen dead" that the father burns. Scannell is drawing on the vocabulary of war to describe weeding. The effect is layered: the father's attack on the nettles is simultaneously proportionate to his protective love and disproportionate to the threat itself — nettles are not a regiment. The military language is the father's mind projecting; he cannot turn it off.

"White blisters". The physical effect of the stinging injury on the child's skin is rendered precisely but briefly. Scannell does not linger; the child's pain is real but not dwelt on. The poem is more interested in the father's response than in the injury itself.

Destruction and regrowth. "Two days later nettles creep / Back into the place." Whatever the father does, the nettles return. This is the recognition the poem arrives at: the world is full of small stings, and they come back.

Metaphor of protection's limit. The father's actions are competent and loving, but they are not permanent. The nettles grow back; the son will be stung again.

Themes

Theme	How it operates
Parental love	Love rendered as protective action
The limits of protection	The father cannot prevent all pain
The presence of war	Military imagery pervades domestic scene
Childhood vulnerability	The small, soft body met by the world's edges
Regeneration of harm	Pain returns; protection is temporary

A fine reading notices that the poem is not just about this nettle-bed. It is about the father's recognition that his own capacity to keep his son safe is finite. The closing lines step out of the incident into a wider meditation on parenthood.

Suggested comparison partners

Partner	Shared ground	Productive contrast
The Manhunt	Protective love; physical injury; military context	Armitage writes as wife of soldier; Scannell as father
A Child to His Sick Grandfather	Intergenerational love; tender attention	Baillie's child looks up; Scannell's father looks down
My Father Would Not Show Us	Father figure rendered by another speaker	De Kok's father is withholding; Scannell's father is active

Worked paragraph

Both Scannell's Nettles and Armitage's The Manhunt present protective, embodied love through language drawn from war. Scannell's father weeding a garden pictures the nettles as "a regiment of spite" mounting "a fierce parade" — the military vocabulary inflated precisely because he cannot switch it off; his post-war mind projects battalions into his son's sting. Armitage's speaker, the wife of a returning soldier, uses couplets of almost devotional plainness — "Then I found out / my father's skin" — to piece a damaged body back together. Both poems handle the psychological aftermath of violence through close physical care: Scannell's father wields a "slashing scythe", Armitage's wife traces a "grazed heart". Scannell's poem is in controlled ABAB pentameter, its form as contained as the father's voice; Armitage works in short rhymed couplets that feel quieter still. Both poets recognise that protective love in a post-conflict world is ongoing and never complete: the nettles grow back, and the husband's wounds are not finally closed.

Key quotations to memorise

• "A regiment of spite" — the military metaphor for nettles.
• "My son would often feel sharp wounds" — the generalisation of the experience.
• "Slashing scythe" — the father's alliterative, forceful action.
• "Fierce parade" — the nettles dramatised as soldiers.
• "Two days later nettles creep / Back" — the regrowth; the limits of protection.

(Memorise exact wording from your anthology; the above sample the kind of lines to learn.)

Extended worked paragraph — comparison with A Child to His Sick Grandfather