“View of Scotland/Love Poem: Stanza 3: Revision Points”

Content and Context

This stanza offers a significant shift, from an external view of Scotland to an intimate exploration of the speaker’s own personal emotional state.
Lochhead continues her theme of two perspectives merging into one, now framed within the inner emotional sphere of the speaker.
We see the speaker’s love interest as a person separate from Scotland, able to appreciate it as a “foreign country”. This hints at a different perspective coming into play, contributing to the speaker’s complex emotions.

The first two lines illuminate the speaker’s feelings through a metaphor. Her love interest, who has been residing in Scotland, is compared metaphorically to merchandise in a shop window.
This gives an impression of him being attractive but also distant, as things in a shop window are to be admired but not owned.
Personification is used to show the country of Scotland “spread out” like a map under the speaker’s lover’s eyes, highlighting his ability to see and understand aspects of Scotland the speaker can’t.

Lochhead explores themes of identity, distance, and perspective in this stanza. The perspective brought by the speaker’s lover helps her see her own country differently.
The theme of love and longing is also evident, shown through the speaker’s distant admiration of her lover—through his view of Scotland.

This stanza extends the love poem component by showing how love can change our perspective on seemingly familiar things, making them new and exciting.
It also puts forth an interesting thought on how we view ourselves through the lens of others, further extending the idea of dual perspectives that Lochhead explores in this poem.