Liz Lochheadcasts a spell in this magical realist poem.

In 2011 Lochhead was chosen as the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry winner. During her decades-long career she has also been writer-in-residence for Dundee College of Art, poet laureate for Glasgow, and Makar (the national poet of Scotland). She is one of Scotland’s foremost writers: poet, playwright and performer.

The Storyteller is narrated by four characters: Sage, Leo, Josef, and Minka. Each character's narrative is told using a different font. Picoult often employs this alternating narrative style throughout her novels, including in, My Sister's Keeper, House Rules, Change of Heart, Songs of the Humpback Whale, Sing You Home, Handle with Care. The three kids were astonished by the amazing story and started asking a ton of questions before the aunt states her opinion saying the story was 'A improper story to tell to little kids' the man disagrees and walks out 'unhappy women' is the last thing the man says before he leave the coach for good. The short story “Storyteller” contains many stories within it, but most are presented in attenuated, fragmentary form. At the heart of the central conflict of the plot are the stories of how the protagonist’s parents met their death. A storekeeper had given one explanation, it seems, but the woman’s grandmother believes that his story.

Storyteller is the introductory poem in a 1978 collection entitled The Grimm Sisters. These poems follow paths trodden by well-known fairy-tales, but the viewpoint is female and the tone is often ironic. The title of the collection alludes to ‘The Brothers Grimm,’ but the gender and syntax is switched. Lochhead’s intention is to restore to a central position those people whose stories are often marginalised or silenced in mainstream narratives: women, lowly workers, domestic servants. The collection also explores ‘storytelling’: the social importance of stories and tales; the power of a well-told story to cast a spell over listeners; how sharing in the telling of and listening to stories can draw a community of people together. As such, this poem presents a lowly female domestic worker in a central position – her work and words fill the scene and illuminate the household. We can see and hear how important storytelling was to people during long, dark winter nights before the coming of electricity and mass communication.

Storyteller’s first line sets the scene: she sat down. The words are simple and unadorned. Even the capital letter is absent, as if this is a scene that repeats every night without rest. One of the most famous storytellers is Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights. Each night she would leave her story on a cliff-hanger and take it up seamlessly the next night, keeping her audience – including the king – on tenterhooks. Night by night, Scheherazade postponed her own beheading (eventually the king was so won over by the power of her words that he pardoned and married her!) Lochhead’s storyteller wears the mantle of this literary trope: the storyteller sitting down in front of an eager audience to tell a tale. Think of a primary school teacher in front of her class; a troubadour in front of a crowd; an actor stepping out on stage. Lochhead herself is a prolific performer: the simple physical act of ‘sitting’ signifies the storytelling time has come.

For the next hour or so the real-world melts away, to be replaced by the imaginary world of the storyteller’s design. The story is completely captivating. In the lines below look how enjambment between held / breath creates a little physical pause, as if you are holding your breath, waiting:

Night in
she’d have us waiting, held
breath, for the ending we knew by heart.

You might recognise this feeling of anticipation from sitting on the carpet as your teacher read to the class, or being tucked up in bed listening to one of your favourite stories. It doesn’t matter how many times you heard someone tell it to you, you still enjoyed it over and over again. In this poem it’s not the story but the way the storyteller tells it that her listeners love.

The scene is close and intimate. Her audience crowd into the tiny kitchen, each busying themselves with small tasks (grating, sewing) while they listen. She sits at a kitchen table beside a ‘dresser’ (kitchen shelves displaying pots and pans). The diction Lochhead employs is archaic, drawn from the world of fairy stories: ‘delft’ is a Scottish dialect word for clay pottery; ‘swept kitchen’ alludes faintly to the story of Cinderella; ‘dresser’ is an old-fashioned word. Lochhead writes in the literary tradition of magical realism. Rather than point to a specific time and place, she wants to capture a feel: timeless, historical, before electric lights and television screens, a time when nights still hid imaginary terrors and the spoken word contained spellbinding power. Other diction points to the realities of subsistence living: scoured, swept, cracked and salted all suggest physical labour, hardship and privation. Lochhead makes it easy for us to imagine the peasants and servants crowding into a tiny kitchen after a hard day’s work, ready for their evening meal and nightly story by the warmth of the stove.

The first line of the second stanza is the key idea in the poem: no one could say the stories were useless. Telling stories is another kind of work, as vital to the community as salting fish, scouring clean the table, planting in the fields or stitching clothes. It is different because it is not physical work: but telling a vivid story is its own art and skill and is just as important. Lochhead writes as the tongue clacked at the head of a list of other tasks on which her audience absent-mindedly work as they listen: grating corn and repairing (pieced, stitched, darning) worn clothes. The strongest sound in the poem so far is the onomatopoeia word clacked. Drawn from the vocabulary of weaving at a loom, this sound word effectively allows the storyteller’s voice to dominate the scene and equates her art with the work of weaving cloth.

In both the first and second stanza, whether to bring alive the sounds of housework or to suggest the artful mastery of storytelling, the words of the poem leap from the page and into your ear. Try reading it aloud: in stanza one the simple action of the broom comes to life through sibilance: she sat, scoured, swept, beside, dresser, last, salted. In the second stanza fricative F sounds suggest fingers brushing cloth: five or forty fingers. Plosive and dental alliteration bring to mind the physical action of needle punching through fabric: patchwork was pieced… darning was done. But that’s not all – through careful sound matching (an effect called euphony) Lochhead’s scene is peaceful, warming and quiet. Sounds of housework are in the background, they run underneath the storyteller’s words like a musical accompaniment.

In the first of two figurative comparisons, the storyteller’s art is directly compared to weaving:

It was like spinning,
gathering air to the single strongest
thread.

In this simile, Lochhead likens the telling of a story to textiles. In her work the storyteller weaves a story out of her words, seemingly summoned out of thin air. The single strongest thread may refer to the most important feature of a story: its plot, perhaps, or the main character. In idiomatic ways the English language is already tuned to this simile: we say both ‘to spin a good yarn,’ meaning to tell a good story, and ‘following the thread’ of a narrative. Figuratively, it is easy to imagine a story as a single piece of cloth woven from different elements: plot, character, language, structure and so on.

Whatever her supposed day job, we can see that, by night, she becomes an incredible storyteller. You might need to use some inferencing on stanza 3 though, as the first few lines are a little difficult to decode. ‘Slander’ means to speak badly of someone and ‘shift’ can mean a shift at work; therefore slander her shiftless means to complain that she’s not doing any work (like grating corn husks or mending fabric). Never the one looks a bit like Scottish dialect, so unless you’re from the highlands you can understand it as ‘Never be the one’ to complain that she is not working. The storyteller has a couple of other jobs she’s meant to be doing, like cleaning. ‘Sloven’ means to be lazy and ‘spotless’ means that there is not even a spot left: in other words, she is sometimes lazy and sometimes hardworking. From dishwater or tasty was her soup we can infer that she also has to make the soup. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter whether her soup is good (tasty) or bad (dishwater) as the next line states clearly: to tell the stories was her work. I like the idea that, in this community, people are able to see that different skills and abilities are valuable and not everything has to be about productivity. The storyteller is valued for her storytelling abilities above anything else and people seem to appreciate this the most.

As the poem moves into the final stanza so night moves into day. Descriptions of the light are faint and weak, thin grey, as if the reality of the morning can’t compare with the vividness of the storytelling the night before. The way the light washes over the fields adopts the vocabulary of chores again. As the women build the fire and peasants’ feet feel around in the dark for their shoes, the diction reminds us that this is a world of subsistence living where work is never finished. Fricative F sounds are strong at the end of the poem: first, fire, feet felt, flat fields. F is a soft sound suiting the washed-out feel of this tepid grey morning. The line the stories dissolved in the whorl of the ear gives us an image of the stories vanishing. You may think this suggest that there is no place in the real world for the stories, that they are just a temporary relief from daily hardship.

However, following the poetic tradition of the volta or turn (a shift in perspective or thought occurring at the end of the poem), Lochhead steers you away from this thought, presenting instead her second figurative comparison. This ‘turn’ is signalled by white space surrounding the connective butthey:

but they
hung themselves upside down
in the sleeping heads of the children

The image here is of bats sleeping in a cave. It suggests the stories are always present, but by day they are hidden out of sight. It is only when the daily work is done that the bats emerge and flew again in the storytellers night. Think closely about the word dissolved: when something is dissolved in a liquid, though it is transformed into an invisible state, it is not really gone.

The word ‘children’ suggests the true importance of the stories. Not only do they provide a measure of relief from the daily grind, but stories are also vessels for culture, traditions and values. In a time before electronic recording, and when many people (peasants) were unable to read and write, stories were an important method of passing knowledge and ideas on to the next generation. It seems to me that Lochhead purposely withheld mention of children until the end of her poem, so as to leave this idea hanging quietly in the mind of the reader like those figurative bats.

Suggested poems for comparison:

• For De Lawd by Lucille Clifton

I love the voice in this poem. Like Lochhead’s Storyteller, you can tell Clifton’s speaker holds the house together with her strong words.

• The Storyteller by Mike Jones

More a songwriter than a poet, nevertheless the lyrics to this song are certainly in the spirit of Lochhead’s Storyteller.

Additional Resources

If you are teaching or studying Storyteller at school or college, or if you simply enjoyed this analysis of the poem and would like to discover more, you might like to purchase our bespoke study bundle for this poem. It’s only £2 and includes:

• 4 pages of activities that can be printed and folded into a booklet for use in class, at home, for self-study or revision.
• Study Questions with guidance on how to answer in full paragraphs.
• A sample Point, Evidence, Explanation paragraph for essay writing.
• An interactive and editable powerpoint, giving line-by-line analysis of all the poetic and technical features of the poem.
• An in-depth worksheet with a focus on explaining visual, auditory and tactile images.
• A fun crossword-quiz, perfect for a recap lesson or for revision.
• 4 practice Essay Questions – and one complete model Essay Plan.

And… discuss!

Did you enjoy this breakdown of Storyteller? What do you think of Liz Lochhead’s poem? What kind of images came to your mind when you read the descriptions of the community in the poem? Why not leave your thoughts, give us some feedback, or share your ideas in the comments section below. And, for daily nuggets of analysis and all-new illustrations, don’t forget to find and follow Poetry Prof on Instagram.

by H.H. Munro (SAKI)

It was a hot afternoon, and the railway carriage was correspondingly sultry, and the next stop was at Templecombe, nearly an hour ahead. The occupants of the carriage were a small girl, and a smaller girl, and a small boy. An aunt belonging to the children occupied one corner seat, and the further corner seat on the opposite side was occupied by a bachelor who was a stranger to their party, but the small girls and the small boy emphatically occupied the compartment. Both the aunt and the children were conversational in a limited, persistent way, reminding one of the attentions of a housefly that refuses to be discouraged. Most of the aunt's remarks seemed to begin with 'Don't,' and nearly all of the children's remarks began with 'Why?' The bachelor said nothing out loud. 'Don't, Cyril, don't,' exclaimed the aunt, as the small boy began smacking the cushions of the seat, producing a cloud of dust at each blow.

'Come and look out of the window,' she added.

The child moved reluctantly to the window. 'Why are those sheep being driven out of that field?' he asked.

'I expect they are being driven to another field where there is more grass,' said the aunt weakly.

'But there is lots of grass in that field,' protested the boy; 'there's nothing else but grass there. Aunt, there's lots of grass in that field.'

'Perhaps the grass in the other field is better,' suggested the aunt fatuously.

'Why is it better?' came the swift, inevitable question.

The Storyteller Jim Henson A Story Short

'Oh, look at those cows!' exclaimed the aunt. Nearly every field along the line had contained cows or bullocks, but she spoke as though she were drawing attention to a rarity.

'Why is the grass in the other field better?' persisted Cyril.

The frown on the bachelor's face was deepening to a scowl. He was a hard, unsympathetic man, the aunt decided in her mind. She was utterly unable to come to any satisfactory decision about the grass in the other field.

The smaller girl created a diversion by beginning to recite 'On the Road to Mandalay.' She only knew the first line, but she put her limited knowledge to the fullest possible use. She repeated the line over and over again in a dreamy but resolute and very audible voice; it seemed to the bachelor as though some one had had a bet with her that she could not repeat the line aloud two thousand times without stopping. Whoever it was who had made the wager was likely to lose his bet.

'Come over here and listen to a story,' said the aunt, when the bachelor had looked twice at her and once at the communication cord.

The children moved listlessly towards the aunt's end of the carriage. Evidently her reputation as a story- teller did not rank high in their estimation.

In a low, confidential voice, interrupted at frequent intervals by loud, petulant questionings from her listeners, she began an unenterprising and deplorably uninteresting story about a little girl who was good, and made friends with every one on account of her goodness, and was finally saved from a mad bull by a number of rescuers who admired her moral character.

'Wouldn't they have saved her if she hadn't been good?' demanded the bigger of the small girls. It was exactly the question that the bachelor had wanted to ask.

Image Of The Storyteller Short Story

'Well, yes,' admitted the aunt lamely, 'but I don't think they would have run quite so fast to her help if they had not liked her so much.'

'It's the stupidest story I've ever heard,' said the bigger of the small girls, with immense conviction.

'I didn't listen after the first bit, it was so stupid,' said Cyril.

The smaller girl made no actual comment on the story, but she had long ago recommenced a murmured repetition of her favourite line.

'You don't seem to be a success as a story-teller,' said the bachelor suddenly from his corner.

The aunt bristled in instant defence at this unexpected attack.

'It's a very difficult thing to tell stories that children can both understand and appreciate,' she said stiffly.

'I don't agree with you,' said the bachelor.

'Perhaps you would like to tell them a story,' was the aunt's retort.

'Tell us a story,' demanded the bigger of the small girls.

'Once upon a time,' began the bachelor, 'there was a little girl called Bertha, who was extra-ordinarily good.'

The children's momentarily-aroused interest began at once to flicker; all stories seemed dreadfully alike, no matter who told them.

'She did all that she was told, she was always truthful, she kept her clothes clean, ate milk puddings as though they were jam tarts, learned her lessons perfectly, and was polite in her manners.'

'Was she pretty?' asked the bigger of the small girls.

'Not as pretty as any of you,' said the bachelor, 'but she was horribly good.'

There was a wave of reaction in favour of the story; the word horrible in connection with goodness was a novelty that commended itself. It seemed to introduce a ring of truth that was absent from the aunt's tales of infant life.

'She was so good,' continued the bachelor, 'that she won several medals for goodness, which she always wore, pinned on to her dress. There was a medal for obedience, another medal for punctuality, and a third for good behaviour. They were large metal medals and they clicked against one another as she walked. No other child in the town where she lived had as many as three medals, so everybody knew that she must be an extra good child.'

'Horribly good,' quoted Cyril.

'Everybody talked about her goodness, and the Prince of the country got to hear about it, and he said that as she was so very good she might be allowed once a week to walk in his park, which was just outside the town. It was a beautiful park, and no children were ever allowed in it, so it was a great honour for Bertha to be allowed to go there.'

'Were there any sheep in the park?' demanded Cyril.

'No;' said the bachelor, 'there were no sheep.'

'Why weren't there any sheep?' came the inevitable question arising out of that answer.

The aunt permitted herself a smile, which might almost have been described as a grin.

'There were no sheep in the park,' said the bachelor, 'because the Prince's mother had once had a dream that her son would either be killed by a sheep or else by a clock falling on him. For that reason the Prince never kept a sheep in his park or a clock in his palace.'

The aunt suppressed a gasp of admiration.

'Was the Prince killed by a sheep or by a clock?' asked Cyril.

'He is still alive, so we can't tell whether the dream will come true,' said the bachelor unconcernedly; 'anyway, there were no sheep in the park, but there were lots of little pigs running all over the place.'

'What colour were they?'

'Black with white faces, white with black spots, black all over, grey with white patches, and some were white all over.'

The storyteller paused to let a full idea of the park's treasures sink into the children's imaginations; then he resumed:

'Bertha was rather sorry to find that there were no flowers in the park. She had promised her aunts, with tears in her eyes, that she would not pick any of the kind Prince's flowers, and she had meant to keep her promise, so of course it made her feel silly to find that there were no flowers to pick.'

'Why weren't there any flowers?'

'Because the pigs had eaten them all,' said the bachelor promptly. 'The gardeners had told the Prince that you couldn't have pigs and flowers, so he decided to have pigs and no flowers.'

There was a murmur of approval at the excellence of the Prince's decision; so many people would have decided the other way.

'There were lots of other delightful things in the park. There were ponds with gold and blue and green fish in them, and trees with beautiful parrots that said clever things at a moment's notice, and humming birds that hummed all the popular tunes of the day. Bertha walked up and down and enjoyed herself immensely, and thought to herself: 'If I were not so extraordinarily good I should not have been allowed to come into this beautiful park and enjoy all that there is to be seen in it,' and her three medals clinked against one another as she walked and helped to remind her how very good she really was. Just then an enormous wolf came prowling into the park to see if it could catch a fat little pig for its supper.'

'What colour was it?' asked the children, amid an immediate quickening of interest.

'Mud-colour all over, with a black tongue and pale grey eyes that gleamed with unspeakable ferocity. The first thing that it saw in the park was Bertha; her pinafore was so spotlessly white and clean that it could be seen from a great distance. Bertha saw the wolf and saw that it was stealing towards her, and she began to wish that she had never been allowed to come into the park. She ran as hard as she could, and the wolf came after her with huge leaps and bounds. She managed to reach a shrubbery of myrtle bushes and she hid herself in one of the thickest of the bushes. The wolf came sniffing among the branches, its black tongue lolling out of its mouth and its pale grey eyes glaring with rage. Bertha was terribly frightened, and thought to herself: 'If I had not been so extraordinarily good I should have been safe in the town at this moment.' However, the scent of the myrtle was so strong that the wolf could not sniff out where Bertha was hiding, and the bushes were so thick that he might have hunted about in them for a long time without catching sight of her, so he thought he might as well go off and catch a little pig instead. Bertha was trembling very much at having the wolf prowling and sniffing so near her, and as she trembled the medal for obedience clinked against the medals for good conduct and punctuality. The wolf was just moving away when he heard the sound of the medals clinking and stopped to listen; they clinked again in a bush quite near him. He dashed into the bush, his pale grey eyes gleaming with ferocity and triumph, and dragged Bertha out and devoured her to the last morsel. All that was left of her were her shoes, bits of clothing, and the three medals for goodness.'

'Were any of the little pigs killed?'

'No, they all escaped.'

The Storyteller Short Story Saki Book Review

'The story began badly,' said the smaller of the small girls, 'but it had a beautiful ending.'

'It is the most beautiful story that I ever heard,' said the bigger of the small girls, with immense decision.

'It is the only beautiful story I have ever heard,' said Cyril.

A dissentient opinion came from the aunt.

'A most improper story to tell to young children! You have undermined the effect of years of careful teaching.'

'At any rate,' said the bachelor, collecting his belongings preparatory to leaving the carriage, 'I kept them quiet for ten minutes, which was more than you were able to do.'

'Unhappy woman!' he observed to himself as he walked down the platform of Templecombe station; 'for the next six months or so those children will assail her in public with demands for an improper story!'

Return to the H.H. Munro (SAKI) Home Page, or . . . Read the next short story; The Strategist