A Concrete Example

Before anything else, be clear about what kind of writing this is. This chapter is a poem, not a story and not an essay. It is a short comic poem, the kind of writing usually called light verse. Light verse is poetry written mainly to amuse. It uses easy, everyday words, a regular beat, obvious rhymes, and it very often finishes with a joke or a small surprise. That does not make it careless writing. Getting a joke to land in rhyme, in only a few lines, is difficult, and this poem is a neat piece of timing.

The poem is by Reginald Arkell. Notice the spelling: Arkell ends with a double L. He was a British writer who lived from 1881 to 1959. He worked as a journalist, wrote comic fiction and wrote for the London stage. He is remembered most, though, for two things, and both of them are about gardens. One is a set of gardening poems published under the title Green Fingers. The other is a novel called Old Herbaceous, about the life of a head gardener. So a funny poem about a neighbour's garden is exactly the sort of thing he spent his writing life on.

Knowing that helps you read the poem correctly. Arkell was not an outsider sneering at gardeners. He was a garden person writing for garden people. The humour here comes from someone who understands the hobby well enough to tease it. That is a very different thing from mockery, and the difference matters a great deal when you are asked about the poem's tone.

The whole poem is built out of three stanzas, and each stanza has six lines. That is a small, tidy shape, and the poem uses it well: one stanza to set the scene, one to sharpen the detail, and one to spring the surprise. If you think of the poem as a joke told out loud by a neighbour leaning over a garden wall, you will not be far wrong. There is a setup, a build and a punchline, and they arrive in that order.

One more thing worth saying at the start. Nothing dramatic happens in this poem. Nobody is hurt, nothing is lost, and no lesson is preached at you. It is a very small event, a conversation in a garden that ends awkwardly. Part of the skill on display is choosing something that tiny and making it worth writing down at all.

Here is what actually happens, stanza by stanza, in plain words. Read this as a description of the movement of the poem, not as a replacement for the poem itself.

The first stanza: meet the neighbour and her garden. The speaker introduces the person the whole poem is about, the woman who lives next door, Mrs. Jones. Then he shows us her garden, and the striking thing about it is how much of it is stone rather than plant. There is a paved path made of irregular slabs, a small pond with lilies in it, a rockery, and a sundial that has some sort of odd design marked on it. The speaker also mentions that Mrs. Jones is rather pleased with that sundial. That small detail does a lot of work: it tells us the garden is arranged exactly the way she wants it, and that her taste is entirely her own.

The second stanza: the plants, and the first joke. Having shown us all the stone, the speaker now looks at what grows between it. Mrs. Jones puts little plants into the gaps in the stonework, and these plants are so delicate and small that, in the speaker's blunt judgement, they do not amount to anything at all. Do not skip past that. He is not admiring them; he is writing them off as too slight to matter. They are so tiny that he cannot work out how a person could get them in there in the first place, so he offers a comic explanation: she must be planting them with a pin. That is the poem's first real laugh, and notice how it works. It is an exaggeration and a mild put-down at the same time. It also gives him away, because to judge how small something is you have to have looked at it carefully, and because a person who has just called these plants meaningless is going to look foolish in six lines' time.

The third stanza: the visit, and the punchline. Mrs. Jones once asked the speaker round to see her stones. Read that carefully, because it is easy to get wrong: what she invites him to come and admire is the stonework, not a flower. Once he is there, the two of them end up standing and talking about a flower, and the poem puts the length of that conversation at about a quarter of an hour, which is a long time to spend on a single plant. Finally the speaker asks the obvious question, calling the flower a lovely thing and wanting to know where it is. And Mrs. Jones tells him that he is standing on it.

That is the end of the poem. It stops on the reveal and does not explain itself, which is the right decision, because explaining a joke kills it. The poem trusts you to feel the small jolt of embarrassment on the speaker's behalf and to work out the rest for yourself.

Notice the shape of the thing. The poem spends two full stanzas teaching you that these plants are almost invisible, and then in the third stanza it uses that very fact against the speaker. The punchline is only funny because the earlier stanzas prepared the ground for it. Nothing in the first two stanzas is mere decoration; it is all setup.

There are only two people in this poem, and it is worth keeping straight who says what, because students often mix the two of them up.

The speaker is the neighbour who is telling us the story. Almost the entire poem is his voice. Every opinion about the garden, that it is unusual, that the plants are impossibly small, that Mrs. Jones must be using a pin, belongs to him. And he is saying all this to us, the readers, not to Mrs. Jones. That distinction is important. He does not walk into her garden and announce that her plants are meaningless. He tells us, quietly, the way you might describe an eccentric relative to a friend. The poem gives him exactly one line of speech out loud, and in it he calls the flower a lovely thing. So aloud he is complimentary; to the reader he has already written the plants off as amounting to nothing. Polite in her presence and amused in private is a very recognisable and very human way to behave, and the gap between those two voices is worth pointing out in an answer.

What sort of person is he? Observant, for one thing. He can list the contents of her garden accurately and he has noticed exactly how small the plants are. Willing, too: he accepts the invitation and gives up a quarter of an hour to a conversation about one flower. But he is also somewhat clumsy, and not really paying attention where it counts. He can describe the garden beautifully and still fail to notice what is directly under his own feet. That contradiction is the joke of the whole poem.

Mrs. Jones is the subject of the poem, but she barely speaks in it. She is a keen, dedicated hobby gardener whose taste is entirely her own. She likes stone. She likes a sundial with an unusual marking on it. She likes fiddly, miniature plants that most people would never bother with, and she clearly has the patience to place them one by one in the cracks. She is also sociable and proud of her work, proud enough to ask a neighbour round specially to look at her stones, and happy to spend a quarter of an hour talking about one flower.

The most revealing thing about her is how the poem ends. The flower they have been discussing is under a guest's shoe, and the poem records no scolding at all. She simply tells him where the flower is. There is no scene, no anger on the page. That restraint is what makes her likeable rather than absurd, and it is the reason the poem's tone stays light. Had she shouted, the poem would have turned uncomfortable. Because she does not, the whole thing remains a shared joke.

So when you are asked to describe Mrs. Jones, do not settle for saying she loves gardening. Say that she is dedicated, particular about detail, unconventional in her taste, proud of her garden, welcoming to her neighbours, and good-humoured even when something goes wrong. And when you are asked about the speaker, remember that he is the observer, the joker, and finally the one caught out.

The title is a pun, and it is worth slowing down over, because it is the cleverest thing in the poem.

Start with the ordinary meaning. In everyday English, a concrete example means a clear, definite, real case of something, as opposed to a vague description. If a teacher explains a rule and a student then asks for a concrete example, the student is asking for one actual instance they can see and hold on to. Used this way, the word concrete is the opposite of abstract. It means solid, specific, something you can point at.

Now take the second meaning. Concrete is also the hard grey building material used for paths, paving and garden structures. And this poem happens to be set in a garden that is unusually full of hard, built surfaces: paving, a rockery, the edge of a pond, a sundial. Of all the gardens in the world, this is the one where the word concrete describes the actual scenery.

So the title carries both meanings at the same time, and that is exactly what a pun is: one word or phrase pointing in two directions at once, with both directions making sense. The poem is a concrete example, meaning a specific and definite illustration, of Mrs. Jones's gardening, and it also takes place among concrete and stone.

There is a third layer, and it is the best one. At the end of the poem the speaker asks to be shown the flower. He wants precisely what the phrase means: a real, visible instance rather than more talk. And he gets one. He gets the most concrete example imaginable, because the thing is directly under his foot, and he has been receiving a demonstration of it, in the most physical sense possible, for the past quarter of an hour. The title makes a promise, and the last line keeps it in a way the speaker would rather it had not.

This is why the title should never be treated as a throwaway label. A good title in a comic poem sets a trap. This one names the joke before the joke has happened, and you can only see that once you reach the end. If you re-read the poem after finishing it, the title has quietly changed meaning. That is a sign of careful writing, not an accident.

When you write about the title in an answer, mention every meaning you can support: the everyday sense of a definite, specific example; the literal building material in the garden; and the way the ending makes the phrase come true. An answer that mentions only one of these is only a third of an answer.

The poem gets its effect from a few simple, very deliberate techniques. None of them is complicated, and you can point to every one of them in an answer.

The refrain. Each stanza begins by naming the same person again: My next-door neighbour, Mrs. Jones. A line that repeats like this is called a refrain. Always ask what a refrain is doing. First, it makes the poem sound spoken rather than written; it is the way a real person tells an anecdote over a fence, circling back to the same phrase each time they start a new bit. Second, it keeps Mrs. Jones at the centre. However much the poem describes stone and flowers, it returns to her, so we never lose track of whose poem this is. Third, and most usefully, it builds a rhythm of expectation. By the third time you hear that line, you are expecting another mild, amusing observation about the neighbour. Instead you get the twist. Repetition is what makes the surprise land hard.

The rhyme. The poem rhymes in pairs, first line with second, third with fourth, fifth with sixth, a pattern usually written as AABBCC. Rhyming pairs like this are called couplets, and they are a natural choice for comic verse. A couplet closes fast. You hear the first line, and the second snaps shut on the rhyme like a lid. That quick, tidy click is very good for jokes, because a joke needs a clean finish. A long, loose rhyme scheme would let the humour drift and go slack.

The sound patterns. There is alliteration in the poem, which is the repeating of the same starting sound in nearby words. You can hear it in next-door neighbour, where the n sound repeats; in the closing line of the second stanza, where the speaker imagines that she plants them with a pin and the p sound repeats; and in the description of the sundial with a strange device, where the s sound runs through the phrase. Alliteration here is not solemn or grand. It makes the lines bouncy and easy to say aloud, which is exactly right for a poem meant to entertain.

The vocabulary. The words are ordinary. There is nothing difficult or self-consciously poetic in the way the speaker talks. That plainness is a choice, not a limitation. A poem that used grand, elevated language about a garden of little rock plants would sound silly, and the joke would sink under the weight. Keeping the language flat and conversational lets the funny observations stand out on their own.

Understatement and timing. Notice that the poem never tells you the ending is funny. It does not say imagine my embarrassment, or describe the speaker turning red. It simply reports what Mrs. Jones said, and stops. Leaving out the reaction is a comic technique in itself. The reader supplies the embarrassment, and a joke you complete yourself is always funnier than one you are handed.

Comic poems still carry ideas. Here are the ones this poem is genuinely carrying, along with what you can safely say about each.

Irony. The main device at work in the ending is situational irony, which is when what actually happens is the opposite of what everyone expected. The speaker spends the whole poem as an observer, the person who looks at this garden and notices things about it. He is the one with the sharp eye. And then he turns out to be the one person present who has failed to see the thing directly in front of him. The person describing the tiny plants is the person standing on one. The reversal is neat, and it is aimed at him rather than at her.

Who the joke is on. This is worth stating plainly, because it decides the poem's entire tone. For two stanzas it looks as though Mrs. Jones is going to be the figure of fun: the eccentric with the strange stone garden and the plants you apparently need a pin for. Then the last line flips it, and the fool of the poem turns out to be the speaker himself. Comic writing that ends with the teller as the butt of the joke is warm rather than cruel. Had the poem ended with Mrs. Jones looking ridiculous, it would have been mockery. Ending on the speaker's own foot makes it good-natured, and that is why the tone is best described as light-hearted and amused rather than sarcastic.

Small things are easy to miss and easy to damage. This is the quiet idea sitting underneath the laugh. The plants in this garden are almost invisible, and being almost invisible is dangerous, because it means people walk on them. Something can be carefully tended, genuinely valuable to the person who tends it, and still be flattened by someone who simply was not looking down. You can extend that thought a long way beyond gardening if you want to, but the poem itself does not push it. It leaves it there for you to pick up.

Other people's enthusiasms. From outside, Mrs. Jones's hobby looks odd: all that stone, all that fuss over plants nobody can even see. From inside, it is a source of real pride and real pleasure. The poem lets both views exist at the same time without ruling that one of them is correct. It gently suggests that what looks like a strange obsession from the pavement is usually something meaningful to the person doing it, and that the reasonable response is amusement rather than contempt.

Looking versus seeing. Finally, the poem is about the difference between looking at something and actually noticing it. The speaker looks at the garden a great deal. He describes it accurately and well. Yet for fifteen minutes he stands in one spot discussing a flower without once checking what is beneath him. Being able to describe something is not the same as paying attention to it.

If you are asked for the poem's message, be careful not to make it sound heavier than it is. This is not a poem with a moral bolted onto the end. It is a joke that happens to leave a small, true thought behind: notice the little things, and watch where you put your feet.

A few words in this poem are worth learning properly, because they are the words that decide whether you picture the garden correctly in your head. Get these right and the poem becomes easy.

• Rockery is a part of a garden built up out of rocks and stones, with small plants tucked into the gaps between them. A rockery is a real and popular garden feature, not something odd that Mrs. Jones invented. Knowing that stops you imagining her garden as a heap of rubble; it is a designed thing.
• Sundial is an old device for telling the time using shadow. A pointer casts a shadow onto a flat marked face, and the position of that shadow shows the hour. In modern gardens a sundial is usually decorative rather than genuinely useful, which is exactly the point here: it is an ornament that Mrs. Jones enjoys having.
• Device is the word worth pausing on, because it can honestly be read two ways here and you should know both. The older, literary meaning is a design, emblem or figure marked on something, which would make a sundial with a strange device a sundial with an unusual design on its face. The other reading takes the sundial itself to be the device, meaning an instrument made for a purpose, here telling the time by shadow. Your textbook works from that second reading and asks you to sort out the family of words around it, so learn those: an implement works by being moved by hand, such as a spade or a knife; a tool is used by hand to make or repair, such as a hammer; equipment is a set of items needed for one particular purpose, such as a cricket bat, helmet and batting gloves; an appliance is electrical and does work about the house, such as a mixer grinder; and a gadget is something small that is mechanical or electronic, such as a mobile phone or a laptop. Whichever sense you take, the word does the same job in the poem: it makes an ornament in an ordinary back garden sound faintly grand and mysterious.
• Crazy path points to the gardening term crazy paving: a path made from broken, irregular slabs fitted together, so the joins run in odd directions instead of neat straight lines. It does not mean the path is mad. Once you know the term, the line stops being puzzling and becomes plain description, though the word crazy does also carry a faint extra smile, since it suits the general oddness of the garden.
• Delicate means fragile, easily damaged, needing careful handling. In this poem the word is doing serious work. The plants are described as delicate long before anybody stands on one, so the ending has already been prepared by the vocabulary itself.
• Lily pond is a small ornamental pool with water lilies growing on the surface. It is one more sign that this garden has been designed and arranged rather than simply allowed to grow.

And one phrase, because it is the title itself: a concrete example. In ordinary use it means a specific, real, definite instance of something rather than a general or abstract statement. It is a genuinely useful phrase to have in your own writing and speech. If you argue that films influence the way people behave and somebody asks you for a concrete example, they want you to name one actual film and one actual effect, not to repeat the general claim.

Learning these six or seven words is most of the work of understanding this poem. It is a short poem in simple language, and the only things that really block a first-time reader are the garden terms and the older sense of the word device.