Box Room: Stanza 1

Box Room: Stanza 1

“Box Room”: Stanza 1

Background and Setting

• Lochhead’s “Box Room” is a first-person narrative poem that relays the speaker’s thoughts and feelings on visiting her boyfriend’s childhood home for the first time and being accommodated in the ‘box room’.
• This first stanza sets the emotional stage and introduces the dominant themes of isolation, displaced presence and past versus present.

Use of Imagery

• Throughout the stanza, Lochhead uses vivid imagery to describe the room. The description of the box room as “square and neat” yet “airless” gives a sense of enclosure and stifling atmosphere.
• The image of the “spare bed” prepared for the speaker emphasises her status as an outsider, being urged to sleep in a room filled with relics of her boyfriend’s past.

Personification

• Lochhead introduces the idea of animate history. The personification of the “room waits” emphasises the sense that the room itself, imbued with the boyfriend’s history, might scrutinise or reject the speaker.
• The “narrow bed” that “knows” her fear further cement the room as an active threat, creating a tension that persists through the poem.

Use of Symbols

• The “lumpy” cot, filled with teddy bears and other childhood toys, is a potent symbol of the boyfriend’s past life, presenting a physical obstacle to the speaker’s current relationship.
• The speaker’s awareness of these symbols sets up a psychological battle with her insecurities and fears.

Tone and Mood

• It is important to note the underlying unease and tension in this first stanza. Lochhead establishes an unsettling tone through her admixture of simple descriptions and metaphorical language.
• The speaker’s apprehension at stepping into the past, almost as an intruder, sets the mood for the following stanzas.

Studying the intricate use of themes, metaphorical language, and creation of mood in this stanza prepares one for a deeper understanding of the entire poem “Box Room”.