Poetry: ‘Look We Have Coming to Dover’

This post looks at Daljit Nagra’s poem ‘ Look We Have Coming to Dover’.   It is one of the poems from the Poems of the Decade anthology studied for A Level Literature with Edexcel.  This is a rather long blog as the poem is rather complex and just keeps on giving.  Select what you will…

You can read the poem here.  

You might also like to look at the poem cited in the epigraph here – ‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold.  

This is an incredibly vibrant poem which is packed with vivid visual and aural imagery  to evoke the difficulties of the immigrant journey.  There is a satirical tone that satirises the racist narratives often constructed around stereotypes.  

The title immediately alerts us to the issue of language.  The non-standard grammar plays on the stereotype of a non native speaker using the awkward sounding verb construction ‘have coming’ instead of the more usual ‘have come’.  The use of the progressive participle here, instead of the perfect tense, suggests a lack of knowledge but also reveals an interesting difference.  Presumably the voice is translating another language very literally and using the appropriate tense in the original language.  This could be taken as an illustration of fusion  of two cultures;  English lexis is combined with the grammatical construction from a different culture.  It is also the type of utterance that can be ridiculed by an unsympathetic ear.  Immediately Nagra raises the issue of humour being used to mock but the satire here is at the expense of the abusers as Nagra laughs at the abuse.  The excitement of the exclamation  hints at the promise of a better life which is immediately undermined by the inhospitable welcome demonstrated here by the perverse weather.  

In the first two stanzas, Nagra presents the immigrants lacking control or the ability to act.    The verbs  ‘stowed’ and ‘hutched’ create imagery associated with captivity and animals.  ‘Phlegmed’ suggests that the sea itself is insulting the immigrants by spitting on them, drawing on the type of abuse that many foreigners experience.  The cliffs of Dover have not provided a hospitable welcome, just as some of the British community reject the presence of the immigrants.  Indeed the pun on ‘prow’d’ and the verb ‘lording’ suggest people looking down upon the newly arrived and relate to imagery from a feudal era.  

The poem is a parody of the type of narrative often constructed by anti-immigration campaigners.  The voice refers ironically to ‘swarms of us’ picking up on the sort of derogatory and offensive language that is often employed to describe outsiders.  (David Cameron famously used the word ‘swarm’ in a derogatory manner, attracting immense criticism.)  The semantic field of insects implies a homogeneity and has negative connotations of plague.  Nagra employs such imagery to laugh at the insecurities of a population of tabloid readers who believe everything they read.  

It is also notable that the immigrants lack identity in the first stanza, demonstrated by the lack of pronouns; we do not know who is ‘stowed’.   As the poem progresses, we get the suggestion of community through the use of the possessive determiner ‘our’ and then the plural first person pronoun ‘we’.  This helps to establish a presence and a voice.  Eventually, the voice narrows to an individual ‘I’ showing a personality has emerged from the ‘swarms’.  

The sibilance and alliteration of ‘Stowed in the sea to invade’ conjure up the sound of the sea and are also reminiscent of Old English alliterative verse, suggesting a certain primitiveness in the account of the voyage as well as highlighting the threat that some believe immigrants present.  This, however, also reminds the reader that England is part of an island nation whose population is made up of invaders.  Nagra successfully mingles the suggestion of racist attitudes with an ironic reminder of history. 

The white cliffs of Dover are a traditional symbol of Britishness referring to justice and, in World War II, offering a sense of hope and resistance against the Nazi regime.  Now these cliffs are crumbling and ‘scummed’ some would say by the immigrant population  but Nagra reverses this suggesting that they are now tainted by racism.    The voice of the poem laughs at the ‘yobbish rain’ and the thunder that ‘unbladders’, while also making fun of the stereotypical preoccupation of the British with their weather.  Indeed the talk of weather suggests that the voice is well used to British conversation.  

Nagra has an intimate knowledge of English and demonstrates it in all its rich diversity.  Lexis such as ‘cushy’, ‘sundry’ and ‘hoick’ show an easy familiarity with informal language as do the  idiomatic ‘stab in the back’, ‘bare-faced’ and ‘unclocked’.  The word ‘vex’ came into English from Latin via French and is used by Shakespeare.  It is evidence of the long history that goes to make up a modern society and its recent resurgence is testimony to the adaptability of the language.  The anthimeria (creating a noun from a verb) of ‘phlegmed’ and ‘Blair’d’ demonstrate a linguistic creativity that here reflects the sentiment of the epigraph ‘so various, so beautiful, so new…’.  Nagra  here demonstrates a masterful command of the language.  

The last stanza focusses in on an individual experience and relationship, as does Arnold’s original.  There is a sense of having reached a possible, maybe ‘imagined’ destination and having left a state of being ‘hutched’ to be ‘free’.  The word ‘free’ itself sits alone after the caesura at the end of a line as a syntactic  demonstration of  independence but note that it is still enclosed by punctuation.  Glasses are raised ‘East’ in a celebration of difference and achievement.  The immigrant voice may express the position of the second generation who have become accepted in the Blairite atmosphere of plenty.  The voice refers to those who have ‘beeswax’d cars’, a typical image of middle England, and asks the reader to ‘imagine’ again with a sense of irony.  The immigrant has the last laugh as Nagra refers satirically again to the prejudiced who might talk of ‘babbling’ and ‘lingoes’.

The structure of this poem suggests the sea both in terms of graphology and meter.  Lines increase in syllable length through each stanza suggesting a flowing tide.  Each stanza starts with an initial ‘s’ sibilance to illustrate the sea  until the last which imagines the journey over.  There is progression from the boat journey to the Bedford van and then to an end destination of a settled domestic life.  

I hope that this has given you some starting ideas.  For help with further exploration of the poem go to Like Maria’s Poetryfile website.