Background to the poem
Formed when molten glass is dropped into cold water, a ‘Prince Rupert’s Drop’ is a jewel‑like, tadpole-shaped droplet of glass that is both incredibly strong and very fragile. The italicized line at the beginning of the poem suggests the poet’s interest in this, but the poem swiftly reveals that the interest lies not in glass‑making so much as the states of tension the phenomenon encourages the poet to consider.
The poem is a string of bright visual metaphors in which the drop is imagined variously as an ‘eye’, an ‘ear’ and a ‘lantern’. But it is the running play of sounds that links the language together and gives it rhythmic impact.
A sonic chain stretches between the monosyllables ‘drop’, ‘rock’ ‘neck’, ‘like’, ‘kick’, ‘nick’ and ‘snap’; another between ‘sugar’, ‘mortar’ and ‘surefire’. Notice how the violent verb ‘snap’ is repeated twice and the way in which ‘your’ takes the fascination with the drop into a more personal realm and one that makes us think of love and loss. The final couplet of the poem might suggest a harmonious ending, but the emphatic ‘spot’/‘not’ rhyme emphasizes the sense of someone being present one moment and gone a moment later.
About Jane Draycott
Jane Draycott teaches creative writing at Oxford and the University of Lancaster and is an academic and poet with a particular interest in sound art and collaborative work. Her award-winning sound recordings with Elizabeth James have been performed on BBC Radio, and Draycott has also worked with film makers and digital artists. Her most recent writer‑in‑residence assignment was in Amsterdam in 2013.
Nominated three times for the Forward Prize for Poetry, her first two full collections, Prince Rupert’s Drop and The Night Tree, were both Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Her latest collection, Over, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her work has a mesmeric intensity and blends feelings with ideas in ways that are inventive and arresting.
She was nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets in 2004. Draycott’s most recent book is an acclaimed translation of the anonymous medieval poem Pearl.
Founded by Andrew Motion and Julie Blake in 2012, developed by The Poetry Archive with The Full English, and funded by the Department for Education, Poetry by Heart is a national poetry recitation competition open to all pupils and students in England aged between 14 and 18. The Poetry By Heart website is a shared asset of The Poetry Archive and The Full English. It is maintained and developed by The Full English as a resource for a national poetry recitation competition and for teaching and learning about poetry.