John Cornford was an English poet and committed communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War. His poem, 'To Margot Heinemann' concerns his lover, also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. This report presents an analysis of the poem.
Cornford's title alone gives us an impression as to the nature of his poem, and after just one reading, we regain that it is a love poem. It is in the first person, creating the (possibly false) impression that the poet himself, John Cornford, is the protagonist.
Love Poem
However there is some ambiguity as to whom the poem is precisely addressing, clear in the first stanza. The phrase: 'Heart of the heartless world' is a fragment from a quotation by Karl Marx in regard to religion. In the original quotation, Marx describes religion as 'the opium of the people', calling it 'the heart of a heartless world'. Cornford would appear, therefore, to be addressing religion itself, a view strengthened in the second line with the repetition of the word 'heart'. Any way looking as he was a devoted communist, such religious sentiments would seem unlikely. Another reading might assume that Cornford reveres his girlfriend - the eponymous Margot Heinemann - with the kind of reverence a religious believer may regard their chosen faith.
Although this poem's article is undeniably lyrical, an awareness of setting becomes apparent in the second and third stanzas. Straight through the line 'The wind rises in the evening' we regain a sense of time of day, and then a sense of the time of the year with the following line 'Reminds that autumn is near'. A exact location is stated in the chance line of the next stanza 'On the last mile to Huesca' which places the poem on a late summer's day in Aragon, Spain.
Other details are conspicuously omitted, for example the reader learns dinky about the field of the poem, Margot Heinemann herself. Any way they do learn something of the narrator, who we regain is anxious, indicated in the lines 'I am afraid to lose you,' and 'I am afraid of my fear' in the second stanza. It is piquant to note that although this is considered a war poem, nowhere does the narrator state that it is an impending friction of which they fear.
In formal terms, 'To Margot Heinemann' is a decidedly original poem. Cornford compresses the report into a fairly just shape, with lines of approximately equal length and a discernible rhyming scheme, where the last word of the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhymes, such as 'you' and 'view', and 'near' and 'fear', in stanzas 1 and 2 respectively. Any way the final stanza ends with a half rhyme, with 'grave' only partially rhyming with 'love'. The corollary of this is to generate emphasis on this last line by drawing the reader's attention to it: 'Don't forget my love'. The poem's exacting buildings serves to intensify its sincerity of tone.
An pathology of the John Cornford Poem 'To Margot Heinemann'
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