Naming of Parts Poem by Henry Reed

1. Naming of Parts Poemby Henry Reed Anton Myers D3

2. Author and brief biography • Henry Reed was a British poet, translator, radio dramatist and journalist. He was born in Birmingham and educated at King Edward VI School, Aston, followed by the University of Birmingham. At university he associated with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeiceand Walter Allen. He went on to study for an MA and then worked as a teacher and journalist. He was called up to the Army in 1941, spending most of the war as a Japanese translator. After the war he worked for the BBC as a radio broadcaster and playwright, where his most memorable set of productions was the Hilda Tablet series in the 1950s. The series started with A Very Great Man Indeed, which purported to be a documentary about the research for a biography of a dead poet and novelist called Richard Shewin. This drew in part on Reed's own experience of researching a biography of the novelist Thomas Hardy. However, the 'twelve-tone composeress' Hilda Tablet, a friend of the late Richard Shewin, became the most interesting character in the play; and in the next play, she persuades the biographer to change the subject of the biography to her - telling him "not more than twelve volumes". Dame Hilda, as she later became, was based partly on Ethel Smyth and partly on Elisabeth Lutyens (who was not pleased, and considered legal action).

3. Historical Background • REED, Henry (1914-1986), poet and playwright, was born in Birmingham 22 February 1914, the elder child and only son of Henry Reed, master bricklayer and foreman in charge of forcing at Nocks Brickworks, and his wife, Mary Ann Ball. He was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Birmingham, where he specialized in classics. Since Greek was not taught, he taught himself, and went on to win the Temperley Latin prize and a scholarship to Birmingham University, gaining a first-class degree (1934) and an MA for a thesis on the novels of Thomas Hardy (1936). • Like many other writers of the 1930s, he tried teaching and, again like most of them, hated it and left to make his way as a freelance writer and critic. In 1941 he was conscripted into the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, in which he served—'or rather studied', as he preferred to put it—until 1942 when, following a serious bout of pneumonia and a prolonged convalescence, he was transferred to the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley. At first employed as a cryptographer in the Italian section, he was subsequently moved to the Japanese section, • [370] • where he learned the language and worked as a translator. In the evenings, he wrote much of his first radio play, Moby Dick(1947), and many of the poems later to be published in A Map of Verona (1946).

4. Theme Reed’s ironic antiwar poem, which balances the parts of a weapon against an altogether different set of parts in human beings, is easy to catch by readers. The two sets of parts named in the poem are pieces of a weapon and objects in nature, such as the Japonica, the branches, blossoms, and the early bees. In addition, an overtone in the speaker’s meditations is that he is also thinking about the parts of a woman. The ideas explored here are neither profound nor cosmic; the poem suggests that young men in spring would prefer to follow their natural instincts rather than listen to boring military lectures. Some readers may not immediately perceive the poem’s ambiguity. The contrast between the lecture and the out-of-doors is fairly easily understood, but the application to lovemaking may not be perceived quite as readily.

5. Henry Reed