Song of Sunday by Kathleen Jamie

• Song on Sunday by Kathleen Jamie focuses on a typical Sunday in Scotland, as Jamie remembers it from her childhood.
• The speaker in the poem recalls a day of unending tedium, where the same rituals are performed unfailingly every Sunday.
• The monotonous retelling of the speaker's day is broken up with a reimagining of Sleeping Beauty.

The poem looks at themes of:

• memory and reflection
• ordinary life and domesticity

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You can read Song of Sunday by Kathleen Jamie on the Scottish Poetry Library website.

Song of Sunday is divided into three unequal sections of eleven, eighteen and fifteen lines.

There are many run-on lines (enjambment), mostly written in free verse with an occasional rhyme towards the end.

Section one

The poem opens with an immediate reference to the bleakness of the “driech” day. There is a sense that the speaker goes through the same routine every Sunday. There is the preparation in the morning for the soup, while the speaker carefully follows advice given while sorting her stamps to be added to her collection.

Section two

Almost like the chorus of a song, the speaker recalls the female preparations for the Sunday roast. The lines oscillate as the speaker italicises an imagined scenario, where there is an accident with a paring knife and the scene is paused. The father is remembered having a Sunday rest, while the young sister plays dolls with a neighbouring child. As in a fairy-tale, the speaker sees the family as if they are trapped in a spell and imagines that if she could travel back in time she would wake them with a kiss.

Section three

The preparations being complete, the family meal is eaten. Sunday television is watched. The speaker returns to her stamps, which are now ready to be inserted in her album. After assigning more unusual stamps, she turns to those of Great Britain. She tends this patch in her album with great care, as instructed. The neat, orderly day comes to a predictable conclusion with the insertion of the uniform stamps, and the call to bed.

The opening line provides a bleak picture of a Scottish Sunday:

A dreich day, and nothing to do / bar watch starlings fluchter

It is clear that the “Song” of the title is more a lament, than anything joyful. The use of the Scots words “dreich” (dreary, bleak) and “fluchter” (flutter, flap) help to firmly establish the Scottish setting. The song begins with the passive role of spectator observing starlings, which, in contrast to the human, are getting excited “over soup bones” left out for them.

All forenoon broth-barley, marrowfat peas / swelled in a kitchen jug

The slow passage of time is indicated in the words “All forenoon”, where the only action is the slow chemical reaction of the soup ingredients (“swelled”).

The speaker is performing the parallel action of soaking stamps. The envelopes, in keeping with the sedateness of the day, are personified as “polite”. The sibilance of “soggy” and “stuck” suggest a stagnant state in keeping with the lethargy of Sunday:

neither soggy nor stuck

The child is warned to take care with the colloquial:

watch and not tear them, wait at peace.

It is a day for quiet activities and having to be patient as the time passes slowly. The thought of a "tear" in a stamp seems symbolic of a desire for nothing to go wrong, or possibly for anything out of the ordinary to happen.

In the second section of the poem, Jamie uses shorter lines and indentation, which visually breaks the stanza into fragments. This fragmentary layout and lack of punctuation mimics stream of consciousness. The shorter lines of the chorus convey the unvarying weekly routine of a Sunday. The conversational tone captures the speaker’s voice in short flow-on lines, also known as enjambment.

The opening makes clear that every Sunday was exactly the same:

There’d aye be women / In the kitchen,

“Aye” is a Scots word for “always”. This suggests that the women do exactly the same kitchen chores on Sunday each week.

The meat and the “tatties” are subjected to cruel and thoughtless rituals:

tatties / peeled lovelessly, blinded / pale and drowned.

The speaker personifies the potatoes and suggests there is no joy in the tasks but rather a kind of mindless punishment. The speaker seems to subtly criticise the traditional roles assigned to women at this time, as well as suggesting this weekly ritual of preparing a meal for the family is something to be got through and endured, rather than a genuine reflection of care and love.

With the introduction of italics, the speaker begins to imagine a modern retelling of Sleeping Beauty that takes place on an ordinary Sunday (an allusion). However, instead of pricking her finger on a spinning wheel, the speaker imagines that one of the women:

nicked herself / with a paring knife

A spell is cast and “the house froze”. The speaker suggests that the household are unconscious, trapped within their Sunday routine. But like the prince in the original story, the girl comes to the rescue in dramatic fashion

hacking back in / through privet and rowan

The choice of shrub and tree is significant. The privet, used for hedges, marks off boundaries. The rowan is steeped in folklore and has long been believed to have protective magical properties.

In keeping with the drowsy nature of the day, the father is “mid stretch and yawn”, while the young sister is innocently playing dolls with the girl next door.

The speaker wonders if, as in the fairy-tale, she could wake them with a kiss:

with something alien / and lovely / as a kiss.

There is a striking use of the juxtaposition with contrasting adjectives (“alien” and “lovely”) to describe the kiss. “Alien” implies unfamiliarity and otherness meanwhile “lovely” suggests beauty and tenderness. This gesture of genuine feeling is contrasted with the ""loveless"* routine of the day.

The imagined incident is set within a clear sense of time and the present – “aye”, “now” and “only now”. This song belongs firmly within the framework of so many remembered Sundays.

The imagined scene in section two is an allusion to the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. A small injury is followed by an enchanted sleep, which is only broken by something as "lovely / as a kiss."

Revise what allusion is and how writers use it with this short Higher English revision video.

The use of the rhyme in the opening two lines (“eat”, “meat”) matches the regular pattern of each Sunday:

and we’d be called to eat / what’s put in front of us: potatoes, meat

Everything is regimented, from the compulsory eating of the food to the permission needed to leave the table. Nothing varies from one Sunday to the next with the same wildlife and religious worship on television. As with the food, there is no choice - all there is to watch is what is put in front of you.

My stamps were dry

The speaker’s day returns to the stamps now ready to be inserted in the album. The "dry" stamps is both literal and symbolic - it suggests the stamps are dull and lifeless, as if they lack moisture or life. An occasional example from abroad (USA or "Magyar Poste" (Hungarian Post Office)) is seen as "exotic" amongst the many stamps from home. There is a suggestion that in other parts of the world life is more exciting and colourful, while UK stamps, like the "tuppenny-ha’penny pinks" are ordinary, standard, and uniform. However there is a certain pride in “the wee lion / rampant in a corner” to indicate Scotland (the Royal Banner of the Royal Arms of Scotland is known as the 'Lion Rampant').

Duty still calls in the form of homework before she turns her attention to placing her UK stamps in her album. She turns to the ‘Great Britain’ page of the collection. The quotation marks in the poem may indicate a distancing from this description and title. The sense of disconnection is also suggested by turning to the page "as I was shown". As with the other activities of the day, the speaker seems to be going through the motions, with no other choices available.

fold and align the edges / with the orderly squares.

The sense of neatness matches other phrases like "polite", "at peace" which have described the day. Everything is subdued and organised, with no sense of energy or passion. The act of placing the stamps so carefully in their album implies a certainty in the past which may look rather outdated as the poet looks back.

The three one-word sentences give a brisk ending to the poem – a Sunday is a day the speaker is pleased to have finished:

Press. ‘Bedtime!’ There.

The parental instruction “Bedtime!” comes as a relief. There is a finality about the last word “There.” which shows that, like the stamp album, the speaker's memory of the day is complete. Like a story or a spell, there is a sense that the speaker is glad the day, and the past it represents, is over.

In this dramatic monologue, the speaker looks back on the Sundays of their childhood, which always took exactly the same form. Using the dramatic monologue form allows Jamie to explore this personal memory of the speaker and create a confessional tone. Intimacy is very important in this poem as the scene is so domestic, the rituals are mundane but they are preserved with clarity and described with care.

The title refers to a song, which contributes to the idea of the events being remembered and immortalised in a song or a ballad.

The fairy tale nature of the italicised central portion of the poem is also reminiscent of the stories we all know from childhood.

and spellbound, the house froze –

The poem begins and ends with references to Sunday routines, creating a circular structure. This structure adds to the overall impression of the way our memory of events works, reinforcing the idea of ritual and repetition.

The preparations for the Sunday meal take exactly the same form each week.

There’d aye be women / In the kitchen,

This plays an important part in the song of the title which acts as a kind of refrain and reinforces the repetitive nature of life for this young girl in this domestic setting. The speaker does not portray domesticity as idyllic and warm, but as emotionally detached. The potatoes are “peeled lovelessly,” and the women’s presence in the kitchen is habitual rather than joyful.

The poem subtly critiques traditional gender roles. The women are “aye” confined to the kitchen, performing repetitive tasks. These tasks are associated with words like “lashed”, “lovelessly”, and “blinded pale”. Meanwhile the father is caught “mid stretch and yawn,” and the speaker's younger sister plays with dolls.

The allusion to Sleeping Beauty is interesting as fairy tales typically follow very traditional gender stereotypes. In this poem, the speaker subverts the traditional roles, it is not the typical prince that is imagined coming to the rescue. The poem also links women's confinement to domestic chores to pain/discomfort. Instead of a spinning wheel, the woman “nicked herself / with a paring knife”.

The line “spellbound, the house froze” captures a moment of suspended domestic life. The speaker’s desire to “wake them / with something alien / and lovely / as a kiss” implies a yearning to disrupt or transcend these patterns. The narrator revisits the domestic scenes of their childhood in detail but does not romanticise them. There’s a tension between the familiar (the “lovely”“kiss”) and the unknown (“alien”), between the comfort of routine and the desire for an imaginative escape outside the confines of domestic monotony.

The preparation of the stamps mirrors the food preparations. The actions are merely going through the motions of what has been shown and the result is neat and standardised, "dry" and uninteresting. Finishing the task brings a sense of completion in the last section of the poem, suggesting the speaker has moved on from this type of Sunday.

Song of Sunday looks back at a child’s routine of life in an ordinary home on a Sunday. Similarly, Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead looks back to a traditional Scottish past. Both poems share a similar domestic feel through the activities carried out in one and the objects discarded in the other. In both poems, the past is critiqued as "driech" and "loveless", or "old-fashioned", better to have been "released" by burning.

The everyday objects found on the landfill site are a reminder of an ordinary domestic life lived by the characters Mr and Mrs Scotland. Similarly, the Sunday routine of the stamp collection and the preparations for exactly the same meal every week tell of an unvarying routine.

Jamie's poem Crossing the Loch is also a recollection of youth:

Remember how we rowed toward the cottage / on the sickle-shaped bay…

Both poems are rich in personal memory, recalling moments from the speaker's youth. However, in Crossing the Loch, there is a feeling of fond nostalgia and adventure, whereas the tone in Song of Sunday is more emotionally detached, perhaps sharing the understanding of how monotonous children can find an uneventful day.

The Morrow-bird and What the Clyde said, after COP26 are also poems which reflect on the past, but they take on a wider, more universal point of view of history, rather than the domestic or personal view that we see in Song of Sunday.

The Morrow-bird starts with the powerful image of a glacier and ends in the present chamber of the Scottish Parliament. It emphasises that all things pass and change, but the bird's stark vision of the future needs to be addressed with action. Similarly, the Clyde in What the Clyde said, after COP26? looks back fondly on the successful days of the past, when it was the site of a world-leading shipbuilding industry, and considers all the changes that it has seen throughout history.

There is a similar sense of regret in the past in What the Clyde said after COP-26 and The Morrow-Bird, although the scope of these poems is national or global, rather than domestic, and the regret is about environmental damage, rather than small, contained lives and opinions that perhaps did not fulfil emotional or some other potential.

Song of Sunday can also be linked to Ospreys as they both view seemingly ordinary events through an extraordinary lens. In Song of Sunday, the speaker turns the monotonous preparations of the Sunday meal into a fantastical fairy tale. In Ospreys, the birds migrate every year so in some ways, it is a completely normal occurrence, but the speaker celebrates this journey with awe and wonder.

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