Explore the poem

‘Strawberries’ captures a moment of immensely vivid memory, with Morgan recalling an afternoon of freedom and passion eating strawberries and making love.

The intensity and importance of the experience is established immediately when he states emphatically that no strawberries had ever been as sweet and luscious as the ones the lovers ate that ‘sultry afternoon’. The heat of the day and the gathering storm suggest their rising desire and passion. The poem moves from the past tense to the present in the second stanza, as if trying to recapture the moment in the act of writing: ‘lean back again/let me love you’.

The shape of the poem on the page and the detail of the two forks laid on the plate, suggesting sameness, might indicate that this is a homosexual relationship. Is this significant, or are the themes in this poem universal and applicable to any sexuality or gender?

Note the lack of punctuation, which gives the poem a fluidity of movement that reflects the freedom enjoyed by the lovers, while the language and imagery constantly appeal to the senses. What does the final dramatic line suggest about the lovers’ passion and the act of memory?

About Edwin Morgan

Edwin Morgan was born in Glasgow and lived there throughout his long life, apart from his war years in Egypt and the Lebanon. His work is rooted in his knowledge and love of Glasgow and Scotland, but he was also deeply interested in international developments in poetry. His mastery of classic forms is seen in Sonnets from Scotland,which was published in the 1980s.

Although Morgan built a relatively conventional career as an academic in Glasgow, he was an inventive and inquiring poet, writing about science and technology, history and popular culture as well as the traditional subjects of poetry such as love. The repressive legislation and attitudes towards homosexuality in the first half of Morgan’s life led to his love poems being deliberately ambiguous in terms of gender.

Morgan was honoured by his home city when he became its first Poet Laureate in 1999, and in 2004 he held the post of Scots Makar (national poet of Scotland).