The Full Text of “Carpet Weavers, Morocco”
The Full Text of “Carpet Weavers, Morocco”
-
“Carpet Weavers, Morocco” Introduction
-
In Carol Rumens's "Carpet Weavers, Morocco," a speaker watches in fascination as young Moroccan weavers work away on a prayer rug. No more than "children," these girls are nonetheless practicing a skilled craft—a fact that makes the speaker, an outsider, feel a mixture of admiration, surprise, and curiosity. At last, the speaker comes to see the girls' hard-earned artistry as something sacred, a practice that connects them deeply to their culture, their religion, and the world around them. The poem pays homage to the value of craft and of cultural curiosity, suggesting that openness to what at first seems strange or shocking might offer deep rewards. Rumens first collected this poem in her 1987 book Selected Poems.
-
-
“Carpet Weavers, Morocco” Summary
-
The poem's speaker describes Moroccan children sitting at a loom upon which they weave a rug depicting another world. These girls wear their black hair in oiled braids and are dressed in colorful clothes. They're all of different heights, and the image of them sitting next to each other might bring to mind a panpipe or wind chime.
The girls watch their weaving with the same rapt attention that other children might bring to watching TV. As the vision of an Islamic paradise they're weaving into this rug gets bigger, the bench they sit on will be raised up so they can reach the top of their work. At last, they will weave in the rich pink branches of the trees the rug depicts.
When the carpet is complete, the speaker imagines, a merchant will carry it away and sell it to a mosque, where people will lay it out as a prayer rug. Its thick, soft fabric will give a little bit under the weight of people's prayers.
The children, the speaker concludes, are learning through hard work over time. Through their colorful weaving, the future emerges from their fingertips and freezes into the past.
-
-
“Carpet Weavers, Morocco” Themes
-
Artistry, Connection, and the Sacred
In “Carpet Weavers, Morocco,” a speaker looks on a group of young Moroccan girls weaving prayer rugs and sees something sacred in their hard daily work. Deeply committed to their weaving—and deeply connected to religious and cultural traditions through their weaving—these girls make something holy out of an intense job. Artistry and craft, the poem suggests, can be sacred rituals that weave craftspeople into the world around them.
The young weavers, the speaker observes, are deeply focused on their traditional craft, watching their “flickering knots” with the same hypnotized attention that a Western kid might bring to a flickering “television.” The girls’ commitment to their task also shows in their “varied heights,” which remind readers that these kids start their work very young and keep doing it all through their childhoods. To become an expert weaver, in other words, takes serious commitment and sacrifice (of a kind that might seem shocking to someone from a culture in which children aren’t legally allowed to work!).
But the girls’ commitment to their art form, the speaker reflects, might also reward them with a sense that they are woven into something bigger than themselves. Their artwork has an important purpose in their culture and their religion: they’re participating in an ancient and traditional Moroccan craft, and they’re making prayer rugs, carpets that will be laid down in a "mosque" and used in some of Islam’s most sacred daily rituals.
For that matter, the actual act of weaving works as an image of the way the girls are connected to their culture and to the divine. Just as a weaving brings many disparate threads together into one beautiful picture, the girls’ artistry makes them part of the tapestry of Moroccan culture.
In this poem, then, the act of weaving symbolizes the work it takes to connect with something bigger than oneself. Through their dedication to their craft, the poem suggests, these girls find a place in a harmonious network of tradition and belief.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-12
-
Cultural Difference, Curiosity, and Respect
The speaker of “Carpet Weavers, Morocco” is an outsider, a traveler watching young Moroccan weavers at their loom. At a few moments, the poem hints that some aspects of this sight might be shocking to the speaker: for instance, the fact that these mere “children” work this difficult job can’t help but feel surprising (and perhaps worrying) to an outsider who comes from a place where child labor isn't legal. But the speaker’s persistent curiosity and respect in spite of this surprise suggests that cultural difference needn’t be a source of division; instead, it can be an opportunity to question one’s own cultural assumptions and values.
Watching the young weavers at their work, the speaker is impressed by their elegance and skill. With their lovingly “oiled” braids and “bright” dresses, the girls “make a melodious chime” on the eye, and the rug they’re weaving is absolutely beautiful, a demonstration of astonishing skill for children these girls’ age. These are clearly young people who take themselves and their work seriously, and who play an important part in their culture: they’re working at a traditional craft with an important religious purpose. (Their weavings, the speaker knows, will be used as prayer rugs in mosques.)
But by the same token, the weavers’ seriousness is a little startling to the speaker. When the speaker observes that the girls “watch their flickering knots like television,” they subtly reveal what they’re more used to watching children doing: zoning out in front of the TV. To an observer from a country where children don’t work, the sight of kids with jobs can’t help but raise a certain unease.
However, the speaker’s remark about television might also hint at their ambivalence about their own culture. Rather than passively watching TV, the young weavers are engaging in an important task that they can feel pride in, and one that connects them to their culture and their religion.
Instead of reacting with pure shock and disapproval to the young carpet weavers, then, the speaker uses the difference between these girls’ culture and their own to reflect on both of these worlds. Doing so allows them to see the deep beauty in what the girls are doing. The young weavers' care, their skill, and their deep connection with their cultural traditions all stand out more brightly precisely because their world is different from the one the speaker knows.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-12
-
-
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Carpet Weavers, Morocco”
-
Lines 1-3
The children are ...
... a melodious chime.As “Carpet Weavers, Morocco” begins, the poem’s speaker watches a group of “children” as they sit at their “loom.” These are the “Carpet Weavers” of the title, a surprisingly young group of workers—even a startlingly young group of workers, if one is an outside observer from a place where children don’t work. And this speaker, readers soon gather, must be just such an observer. Even the poem’s title—“Carpet Weavers, Morocco”—suggests an outsider’s eye. This isn’t the perspective of someone who lives in this place and knows these particular girls, but the alert, curious perspective of a visitor seeing something they haven’t seen before.
Though the image of children at work might be startling to the speaker, the picture here isn’t one of grueling child labor, but of magic and beauty. For these “children,” the speaker says, “are at the loom of another world.”
That metaphor invites a sense of the sacred and the strange into the poem right from the get-go. On one level, this vision might simply describe the image the children are weaving into the carpet they’re working on: the carpet might depict another world, an enchanted garden or a forest. But there’s also a hint of something deeper here. The children’s weaving, this mysterious turn of phrase suggests, might connect them with “another world,” with a spiritual world beyond our own. The word “loom,” which can be a verb meaning “to tower over” as well as a noun meaning “a weaving frame,” deepens that sense of mystery. Even as they toil at a literal loom, these children might be sitting in the shadow of something divine.
The speaker doesn’t dig deeper into this potent idea—at least, not right away. Instead, they turn their attention to the weavers themselves, using moments of bright imagery to show readers a group of neat, bright, healthy children. These little girls’ “braids are oiled and black,” the speaker notes; these dark braids stand out against “bright” dresses. The young weavers are carefully dressed and lovingly groomed.
In fact, they’re generally lovely to look at. Even their “assorted heights” as they sit in a row would “make a melodious chime,” the speaker says. That is, they remind the speaker of a panpipe or wind chime. This moment of synesthesia, linking sight to sound, suggests that there’s something pleasing as music in the vision of these girls at their work. (The musical alliteration on the /br/ sound of "braids" and "bright" and the assonance on the /i/ sound of “bright,” “heights,” and “chime” helps create that effect, too.) But again, that image might invite a note of outsider’s discomfort into the poem. If the girls are all different heights, they must start at this work when they’re very young—and keep on doing it all through their childhoods.
In just these first three lines, then, the poem mingles beauty, alarm, fascination, and curiosity. The speaker notices these girls because, at first, they’re startled by them. But as the speaker goes on looking, they see more and more loveliness in what might at first merely look alien.
-
Lines 4-6
They watch their ...
... of the tree-tops. -
Lines 7-9
The carpet will ...
... heaped with prayer. -
Lines 10-12
The children are ...
... frame of all-that-was.
-
-
“Carpet Weavers, Morocco” Symbols
-
Weaving
In "Carpet Weavers, Morocco," the act of weaving becomes a symbol of the way that artwork and craft can connect people to their culture and to the divine. Through weaving, the little girls sitting at the loom are making separate things into one thing, turning loose threads into a coherent picture. The fact that the particular picture they're working on is a prayer rug depicting the "garden of Islam"—the Islamic vision of paradise—invites readers to draw a symbolic connection between the act of weaving and the act of prayer, practices that work in similar ways.
Both weaving and prayer are repetitive, rhythmic, dedicated efforts to make a connection: between threads in weaving, between the human and the divine in prayer. And both of these activities have something to do with small efforts adding up to part of a bigger picture. Through their laborious work, the poem suggests, the girls reach out to "another world," touching something sacred. Similarly, weaving connects the girls to their cultural traditions: carpet-making is an ancient and revered Moroccan craft. The girls' weaving thus comes to symbolize a lovely, life-giving kind of interconnection.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 1
- Lines 4-6
- Lines 10-12
-
-
“Carpet Weavers, Morocco” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
-
Imagery
The poem’s imagery captures the loveliness of the young weavers at their work. When the speaker first looks at the girls sitting at the loom, they notice the care and beauty with which these young women present themselves as much as the rug they’re working on. The girls’ “braids are oiled and black,” the speaker observes, and their dresses are “bright”: an image in which the girls’ dark, shining, lovingly maintained hair stands out against lively color. These girls (or their parents!) clearly bring the same meticulous attention to their hair and clothes that they do to their work.
While that first image suggests there’s a similarity between the girls (all with the same oiled braids and bright dresses), another notes the variation between them. “Their assorted heights,” the speaker says, “would make a melodious chime.” Linking sight to sound, this moment of synesthesia suggests just how harmonious the girls look together: all different heights, they’re pleasing to the eye as a major chord would be to the ear. This image also reminds readers that these children may be dedicated to this work for life: the tallest girl in the “chime” now might have started weaving when she was as little as the shortest.
The weaving grows, too. Eventually, when this rug is nearly done, the girls will reach up to “lace the dark rose-veins of the tree-tops,” the speaker imagines. This image gives readers a flash of the rug’s colors and imagery: trees woven in a deep pink wool, their delicate branches reaching out in patterns like veins. (Perhaps the metaphor of the veins also reminds readers that the girls are figuratively pouring their life’s blood into this work.)
The speaker later imagines where this rosy rug will go when it’s finished. It will end up in a “mosque,” where, “deep and soft, it will give when heaped with prayer.” Readers might be able to feel the plushness of the rug beneath their own knees at this line: the imagined “give” of the fabric suggests a thick, luxurious, generous surface.
Together, these images capture the speaker’s impression of sacred loveliness in the weavers and the weaving. These girls, young though they are, demonstrate the holiness of care, skill, and beauty through their bodies and their work alike.
Where imagery appears in the poem:- Lines 2-3: “Their braids are oiled and black, their dresses bright. / Their assorted heights would make a melodious chime.”
- Line 4: “their flickering knots”
- Line 9: “Deep and soft, it will give when heaped with prayer.”
-
Metaphor
-
Simile
-
End-Stopped Line
-
Alliteration
-
-
"Carpet Weavers, Morocco" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- A melodious chime
- The garden of Islam
- Mosque
- The school of days
-
(Location in poem: Line 3: “Their assorted heights would make a melodious chime”)
A pleasant-sounding harmony.
-
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Carpet Weavers, Morocco”
-
Form
“Carpet Weavers, Morocco” is written in free verse. That means that it doesn’t use a regular rhyme scheme, meter, or poetic form. Instead, Rumens invents her own meaningful form, shaping the poem to match (and to honor) the scene she describes.
Rumens divides the poem’s twelve lines—which are all of roughly equal length—into four three-line stanzas (a.k.a. tercets). On the page, the poem looks regular, steady, and rectangular: in short, it looks a lot like the carpet the little weavers are working away on. The poem thus feels as meticulously and meditatively crafted as the sacred carpet is, steadily woven right alongside the “garden of Islam” growing in the carpet’s threads.
Besides simply fitting the poem to the scene that it describes, this form subtly draws a connection between the literal kind of weaving the children are doing and the metaphorical kind of weaving Rumens is doing. Poetry and carpet-weaving, this form suggests, are both ways to use art as a kind of sacred meditation, and perhaps to reach out to the future through the work of one’s hands and mind.
-
Meter
Written in free verse, “Carpet Weavers, Morocco” doesn’t use a regular meter. Nonetheless, the poem looks and feels even. Its lines are all about the same length, and its stanzas move in steady groups of three lines apiece. The poem's form ends up resembling nothing so much as the carpet the little weavers are working on, mirroring both the shape of their artwork (regular and rectangular) and the pace at which they work (measured and rhythmic).
End-stopped lines play a big part in creating the steady rhythm here. Nearly every line in the poem ends with a firm period, so the stanzas move along slowly and deliberately. The only exception to this rule arrives in the poem's final lines, where a single enjambment appears:
From their fingers the colours of all-that-will-be fly
and freeze into the frame of all-that-was.Landing on the word "fly," that enjambment helps to launch into the poem's final mysterious images with extra energy, matching the creative leap across time that the lines describe.
-
Rhyme Scheme
This poem is written in free verse, so it doesn’t use a regular rhyme scheme. Instead, it creates music through flickers of internal rhyme, as well as broader assonance and alliteration.
Lines 2-3, for instance, knit sounds together as the carpet weavers intertwine their threads:
Their braids are oiled and black, their dresses bright.
Their assorted heights would make a melodious chime.Most striking here is the internal rhyme between “bright” and “heights.” The long /i/ sound in both of those words also links to the metaphorical “chime” these little girls’ varied heights make in the speaker’s eye. The striking /br/ alliteration of “braids” and “bright” and the softer /m/ alliteration of “make” and “melodious” deepens the texture of the sounds here. All these effects work together to make the poem’s music match what it describes: a scene of collaborative artistic harmony.
Sonic devices do this kind of atmospheric work all through the poem. For instance, when (in lines 8-9) the speaker describes the completed carpets finding a home at a mosque, sibilant /s/ sounds capture mood and sensation alike:
It will be spread by the servants of the mosque.
Deep and soft, it will give when heaped with prayer.This plush sibilance suggests the softness of the carpets and the hush of the mosque alike.
-
-
“Carpet Weavers, Morocco” Speaker
-
The poem’s speaker doesn’t reveal much about their identity. Instead, they’re fully focused on the titular “Carpet Weavers." The speaker's delicate, careful attention to the children parallels the children’s delicate, careful attention to the rug they’re working on.
There are hints, though, that the speaker may be a voice for the poet herself, or at least for someone whose cultural background is more like Carol Rumens’s than the children’s. When the speaker observes, for instance, that the children “watch their flickering knots like television,” they imply a comparison with what English children (for example) might be more likely to spend their time doing. For that matter, the speaker’s very fascination with the carpet weavers might suggest that they’re seeing them from the perspective of someone who doesn’t watch children doing this kind of work every day.
But really, readers can gather more about the speaker from the poem’s tone than anything. This speaker is clearly a thoughtful person, sensitive to the beauty and significance of the children’s craft and moved by the thought that the carpets they weave will serve a sacred purpose—and perhaps outlast their creators, living on as a token of “all-that-was.”
-
-
“Carpet Weavers, Morocco” Setting
-
As the title informs readers, this poem takes place somewhere in Morocco. There’s no more specific location given than that. Readers might thus get the sense that the speaker is a traveler in Morocco, not a native: the poem feels as if it captures not a local’s familiarity with an everyday sight in a particular town, but a general impression of a whole country, anchored in one symbolic scene.
That scene is the sight of a group of young carpet weavers seated in front of a loom. The speaker looks at these little girls with alert fascination, noticing their “bright” dresses and shining, “oiled” braids. Most particularly, they notice the girls’ careful, expert attention to their work.
Observing that the girls “watch their flickering knots like television,” the speaker suggests that there’s something different about these girls’ lives than the lives of the children they know. During a time of life when European kids might be watching TV, these girls are “hard at work”—something that might seem shocking to someone from a country where child labor is outlawed. But by the same token, these girls are real craftswomen, deeply engaged with an art that has spiritual and cultural value to them. The rugs here will be taken to a “mosque” one day and “heaped with prayer,” used in Islam’s sacred daily rituals.
The poem’s cultural setting is thus revealed through a sense of difference. The speaker feels deep respect for these girls in their “harmonious” and beautiful work. That respect is only deepened by their sense that other children live differently. As the speaker says in the first line, these children sit at the “loom of another world”; to this speaker, that other world is both Morocco and the world of the divine.
-
-
Literary and Historical Context of “Carpet Weavers, Morocco”
-
Literary Context
Carol Rumens (1944-present) is a contemporary British poet. She published her first collection, A Strange Girl in Bright Colours, in 1973, and has published 15 further books of poetry since. "Carpet Weavers, Morocco" was first collected in her 1987 book Selected Poems. Alongside her career as a poet, she has worked as a translator, a professor of creative writing, and a journalist. Her "Poem of the Week" column, in which she chooses a weekly poem to examine and admire, runs in The Guardian.
Of her work, Rumens once said:
Am I a poet? I hope so but how can I be sure? I would rather describe myself simply as someone who loves language, and who tries to make various things with it—poems, chiefly, but also essays, plays, translation, occasional fiction and journalistic odds and ends. Poetry can sometimes bring these different genres interestingly together.
Rumens mentions the English poet Philip Larkin as an important early influence. But her extensive travels in Russia, Ireland, and Eastern Europe mean she also counts international writers like the Russian Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam and the Irish Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian among the poets important to her.
Historical Context
Carol Rumens published this poem in 1987, the same year that Morocco applied to become a member of the European Communities (an alliance that would later evolve into the European Union). The country's application was declined on the basis that Morocco wasn't part of the European continent. But the attempt reveals something about the complex relationship between Morocco and Europe.
This poem's speaker sees Morocco as interestingly (and perhaps startlingly) different from the world they know (which, readers can guess, might be Rumens's native UK). But Morocco has a long history of cultural exchange with Europe and with Spain in particular. Separated only by the Strait of Gibraltar (a narrow sea passage), Spain and Morocco have alternately warred and allied themselves for hundreds of years. The two countries' rich history of trade means that Moroccan and Spanish art and architecture each show the marks of the other culture.
Perhaps Morocco is an especially potent setting for this poem precisely because it is a place of cultural meeting and exchange. Carol Rumens, who has traveled widely and spent time living in several foreign countries, might have felt an appreciation for Morocco's paradoxical combination of closeness to and distance from the culture she was born into.
-
-
More “Carpet Weavers, Morocco” Resources
-
External Resources
-
Rumens's Website — Learn more about Rumens on her personal website.
-
Morocco's Weavers — Watch a short video about Moroccan carpet weaving and learn more about weaving's honored place in Moroccan culture.
-
A Brief Biography — Learn more about Rumens's life and work.
-
An Interview with Rumens — Read a 2006 interview in which Rumens discusses her work and her influences.
-
Rumens Aloud — Listen to clips of Rumens reading and discussing some of her poetry.
-
-
LitCharts on Other Poems by Carol Rumens
-
