The Full Text of “Rising Five”
The Full Text of “Rising Five”
-
“Rising Five” Introduction
-
Norman Nicholson's "Rising Five" deals with an enduring problem: the difficulty of trying to stay in the present moment. In this poem, the speaker encounters a little boy who insists he's not four years old, but "rising five"—leading the speaker to reflect that people often look ahead to what comes next rather than fully experiencing the life right in front of them. The poem's images of birth and decay remind the reader that looking too far forward means seeing only death. The poem was originally published in Nicholson's 1954 collection The Pot Geranium.
-
-
“Rising Five” Summary
-
"I'm almost five years old," he said, "not four," and his small curls messed themselves up on his head. His glasses, full of his huge eyes that stared at me and the meadow, reflected points of light above his cheeks, which were filled with toffee. He had been alive for fifty-six months, or maybe a week longer: not four years old, but almost five years old.
Around him in the meadow, it was springtime, meaning plants and animals were reproducing. Buds opened; leaves opened up on shoots and twigs, and all the trees overflowed with greenery. It was the season after the blossoms come out, but before fruit grows: not May, but almost June.
And in the sky, the dust divided the steeply-angled light into fragments: it wasn't day, but almost night; not right this moment, but almost soon.
New buds push old leaves off the tree branches. We drop our youth like a little boy throws away toffee-wrappers. We never focus on the flowers themselves, only the fruit that's to come; we never focus on the fruit, only the fact that it will soon rot. We look forward to babies' weddings when they're still in the cradle, and we look forward to the grave when we're in our marriage beds: we're not living, but almost dead.
-
-
“Rising Five” Themes
-
The Fleeting Nature of Time
In “Rising Five,” a little boy insists that he’s not four, but “rising five”—leading the speaker to reflect that people are always looking forward to the future, never quite living in the present. The human difficulty with staying put in time, the poem suggests, is why life slips through people’s fingers so fast. And as the poem moves from the speaker’s encounter with the little boy to broad, solemn pronouncements about human nature, it demonstrates the very habit it’s describing: the speaker can’t stay with the moment of the little boy in the spring meadow any more than the little boy can be four rather than “rising five.”
The small boy who begins the poem by insisting that he’s “rising five,” not four, sets the scene: even little children are in the habit of looking ahead to what’s next. The speaker vividly evokes the little boy’s youth through images of his curling hair, his huge eyes, and his “toffee-buckled” cheeks. The boy is the picture of innocence, but he’s already looking forward; even this little kid can’t stay put in the present. This plays against clichés of children as being better at living in the moment than adults, and suggests that the inability to focus on the here and now is a human dilemma, not just a grown-up one.
The speaker looks from the little boy to the meadow they’re standing in, and sees all the growing and blossoming plants as the little boy sees himself: as images of “rising June,” not May. Even the richness of spring can be seen in the light of the future as not-yet-summer. Again, the speaker uses vivid images of new life and fertility that echo the earlier description of the little boy: the trees are “swilled with green,” and even the “cells of spring” are on the move, busily reproducing. But the speaker sees all this brilliant life as “the season after blossoming, / Before the forming of the fruit.” Even though the spring is real and right in front of them, then, the speaker depicts it as a between-time, less real than the past or the future.
The poem's gaze widens in the third and fourth stanzas as the speaker moves away from the moment of the encounter with the little boy. The speaker zooms out to see the present itself as “Not now, but rising soon,” and finishes with broad pronouncements about how humanity as a whole is always looking forward to the next thing—a habit that means humans are “rising dead” even while they’re alive. It’s impossible to really experience life, the speaker suggests, if one is always looking forward. The images of rotten fruit replacing the spring green of the meadow parallels images of humans looking forward from their births to their graves.
This movement from a specific moment with a little boy in a field to a broad, solemn declaration about all of human life mirrors the poem’s big idea. Even this poem about the difficulty of staying with what’s right there doesn’t stay with what’s right there.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-31
-
-
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Rising Five”
-
Lines 1-6
"I’m rising five,” ...
... his toffee-buckled cheeks."Rising Five" begins with a familiar scene: a little kid insisting that he's not four, but almost five. The speaker looks closely at this little boy; what he sees is at once an archetypal picture of childhood and something a little less familiar.
On the one hand, the portrait the speaker creates of the little boy touches on a lot of standard-issue images of children. This boy has a mop of curly hair, huge eyes, and cheeks full of toffee; the reader can see him clearly, a figure at once solemn and a little silly in his solemnity.
But the words the speaker uses to paint this picture are strange and new. Rather than simply saying that the boy had a head of curls, the speaker describes how "the little coils of hair / Un-clicked themselves upon his head." This peculiar use of the word "un-clicked" makes meaning through sound: the sharp consonants of "clicked" give the reader an image of tight, crisp ringlets—which, if "un-clicked," must be loosening themselves, changing.
And this boy's eyes aren't merely big and wet: they're contained in old-fashioned "spectacles" which seem almost to overflow with eye. If his cheeks are "toffee-buckled," they're bulging with toffee, but maybe also glued together with toffee; the reader can hear him through his chewy mouthful as well as see him.
The simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of this little boy give the reader the feeling that the speaker is really looking at him, the way one looks when something has caught one's attention. The speaker is seeing something interesting in this little boy, something beyond the mere sweetness of a child's self-importance about his age. Both change (in the form of the "un-clicked" hair) and bodily decay (in the form of those premature "spectacles") are already here in this encounter with a child who seems too little to be linked to either. The rest of the poem will emerge from this encounter.
-
Lines 6-9
He’d been alive ...
... But rising five. -
Lines 10-13
Around him in ...
... swilled with green. -
Lines 14-17
It was the ...
... But rising June. -
Lines 18-23
...
... But rising soon. -
Lines 24-26
The new buds ...
... away his toffee-wrappers. -
Lines 26-31
We never see ...
... But rising dead.
-
-
“Rising Five” Symbols
-
Spring and Nature
Spring in "Rising Five" plays its ancient role as a symbol of new life and rebirth—but also of inevitable change (and, by extension, death).
The speaker evokes spring with joyful, rich language while looking around at the field; even on a cellular level, spring brings growth and refreshment. But all this abundance also brings with it thoughts of decline. Even as the speaker relishes the spring, the speaker starts to think ahead to summer. The image of flowers turning to fruit turning to rot likewise touches on how the newness of spring is only one part of the natural cycle.
The little boy of the first stanza is closely connected to spring, here. Newness and innocence, the spring symbolism suggests, are always temporary.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 10-17: “Around him in the field, the cells of spring / Bubbled and doubled; buds unbuttoned; shoot / And stem shook out the creases from their frills, / And every tree was swilled with green. / It was the season after blossoming, / Before the forming of the fruit: / not May, / But rising June.”
- Line 24: “The new buds push the old leaves from the bough.”
- Lines 26-28: “We never see the flower, / But only the fruit in the flower; never the fruit, / But only the rot in the fruit.”
-
Light
Light, in "Rising Five," symbolizes the fleeting nature of time. Light is often symbolically connected to time because of the way light changes with the time of day, and that's certainly going on when the speaker remembers how "[t]he dust dissected the tangential light." If the light is "tangential," it's coming in at a low angle, suggesting that the afternoon is wearing on—until it's "not day, / But rising night."
Light here shows the speaker time in the progress of passing. In doing so, it also symbolizes his new understanding or realization about how hard it is to stay rooted in the present moment. (Just think of a lightbulb going off above a cartoon character's head.)
Because of the way light moves and changes across the day and night, it might also symbolize all that is fleeting here, including life itself. When "cones of light" reflect in the little boy's glasses in line 5, there's a sense that his experience is as temporary as these reflections.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 4-5: “His spectacles, brimful of eyes to stare / At me and the meadow, reflected cones of light”
- Lines 18-19: “And in the sky / The dust dissected the tangential light:”
-
Toffee
Toffee turns up at the beginning and end of this poem: once as the little boy chews a huge mouthful of it, once as only a ghost of itself as he discards its empty wrappers. Toffee, then, might here be read as a symbol of life's pleasures, or even life itself: delicious but temporary, and all too easily discarded. When the speaker says of all humanity that "[w]e drop our youth behind us like a boy / Throwing away his toffee-wrappers," the poem evokes the transience of experience, and suggests how easy it is for people to discard what's in front of them.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 6: “his toffee-buckled cheeks”
- Lines 25-26: “We drop our youth behind us like a boy / Throwing away his toffee-wrappers.”
-
-
“Rising Five” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
-
Alliteration
In poems, alliteration often connects words and ideas, or helps to create a musical sound. Because it's not very common in everyday speech, alliteration makes a poem's language sound elevated and distinctive. But it can also link meaningful words together, subtly strengthening a poem's meaning. Here it serves all these roles.
For an especially good example, take a look at the way alliteration works in the final stanza of "Rising Five":
The new buds push the old leaves from the bough.
We drop our youth behind us like a boy
[...] We never see the flower,
But only the fruit in the flower; never the fruit,
But only the rot in the fruit. We look for the marriage bed
In the baby’s cradle; we look for the grave in the bed;This dense alliteration on /b/ and /f/ fits right in with the poem's final, insistent points. All those initial /b/ sounds are blunt and heavy, landing like blows on a drum, demanding that the reader pay attention—and they link ideas of new and old, connecting the fresh bud to the generative bough, and the young boy to the toffee wrappers he leaves behind. Something similar happens with the softer /f/ alliteration, which connects flower and fruit as one follows after another, over and over.
Part of what's going on here is to do with the poem's secret undercurrent of hope. While these last thoughts feel despairing, there's also a potentially uplifting double meaning: "rising dead" could mean "almost dead," but it could also mean "the resurrected dead"!
Mirroring that complexity, the alliteration here links ideas of before and after, cause and effect, and past and future, suggesting that even though humans have a hard time staying in the present moment, there's always a quiet hope of renewal. Even dead ends might be connected to new life.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 5: “me,” “meadow”
- Line 8: “four”
- Line 9: “five”
- Line 11: “Bubbled,” “buds”
- Line 15: “forming,” “fruit”
- Line 19: “dust,” “dissected”
- Line 20: “day”
- Line 21: “night”
- Line 22: “not,” “now”
- Line 24: “buds,” “bough”
- Line 25: “behind,” “boy”
- Line 26: “flower”
- Line 27: “fruit,” “flower,” “fruit”
- Line 28: “bed”
- Line 29: “baby’s,” “bed”
-
Assonance
-
Caesura
-
Consonance
-
Irony
-
Metaphor
-
Repetition
-
Enjambment
-
Imagery
-
Antithesis
-
Simile
-
-
"Rising Five" 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.
- Un-clicked
- Brimful
- Spectacles
- Toffee-buckled
- Dissected
- Tangential
- Bough
-
(Location in poem: Lines 2-3: “the little coils of hair / themselves upon his head.”; Line 3: “Un-clicked”)
In this context, "un-clicked" evokes the little boy's messy hair: his tight curls are disheveled.
-
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Rising Five”
-
Form
The four stanzas of "Rising Five" build outward from one incident, but always return to the same idea. In the first stanza, the speaker describes his encounter with a little boy, who insists he's "not four, / But rising five." In the second stanza, the speaker looks out toward the meadow around them, where the new leaves herald "not May, / but rising June." The third stanza expands its view even further, to light and time: "not day, / But rising night; / not now, / But rising soon." In the final stanza, the speaker has left the scene altogether, turning to solemn words about how all of humanity, in its inability to stay with the present moment, is "not living, / But rising dead."
The shape of this poem thus mirrors its ideas. Starting from a specific moment in time, the speaker's thoughts expand out to take a broader and broader view—leaving the present as he describes leaving the present. The third stanza in particular—much shorter and sparer than the first, second, or fourth—evokes the speaker's liftoff into the abstract world of thought.
All this is fitting for a poem that one might call an elegy, a lament. Here, the speaker seems to mourn not a death, but an unlived life: the kind of life that's divorced from what's right in front of it.
-
Meter
The meter of "Rising Five" is impressionistic and changeable, giving the speaker plenty of room to shape the poem's rhythm to its thoughts.
There's one constant here: the metrical feet are mostly iambs, the foot that goes "da-DUM." Here's an example of how that looks in context in lines 14-17:
And in | the sky
The dust | dissect- | ed the | tangen- | tial light:
not day,
But ris- | ing night;
not now,
But ris- | ing soon.While there's a little bit of variation, the strong beat here almost always falls on the even-numbered syllables. Iambic rhythm fits especially well with poems to do with the passage of time, like this one: it sounds a lot like a heartbeat, or like the unstoppable tick-tock of a clock.
The irregularity of the meter means that the speaker can set certain moments apart for special emphasis. Take a look at all those similar lines with only two or three words: "not May, / But rising June", "not living, / But rising dead." Set against the long, flowing phrases that tend to make up the earlier parts of the stanzas, these short, emphatic lines ask the reader to take a moment and turn their ideas over—in fact, to pause and observe, as this poem suggests it's often so difficult to do.
-
Rhyme Scheme
"Rising Five" plays with a lot of complex rhymes. While the poem uses rhyme throughout, however, its rhymes are inconsistent and unpredictable, often popping up to create surprise or emphasis.
The first stanza is the most predictable. The poem begins with a singsongy ABAB rhyme scheme, throws in a C rhyme, and closes with a DEED pattern:
[...] said, A
[...] hair B
[...] head. A
[...] stare B
[...] light C
[...] alive D
[...] more: E
[...] not four, E
[...] But rising five. DThe rhymes here are harmonious without being totally regular or predictable, suggesting both the natural rhythms of life and growth and the surprise of springy newness around the little boy and the speaker as they talk.
In the second and third stanzas, the rhymes get even less regular. The second stanza throws in a couple of rhyme words, but at unusual intervals: the pattern in lines 10-15 ("Around him [...] the fruit") goes ABCDAB, connecting words across the stanza without falling into a predictable pattern.
What's really interesting here is the way rhymes work across the second and third stanzas. Rhymes here give sudden emphasis to a few particular words. "June" in line 17 rhymes with "soon" in line 23, and "light" in line 19 both hearkens back to that earlier "light" in the first stanza and rhymes with "night" in line 21.
These rhymes link important words—and words that point the reader back to the poem's big theme of the ungraspable present. Linking "light" to "night" suggests that one follows on another with dizzying speed as people keep looking forward to what's next; the "June" that isn't here yet connects to the more general "soon" that people are always waiting for.
A similarly meaningful rhyme pattern turns up in the last few lines of the poem, where "bed" and "bed" rhyme with that final, shocking "dead." Connecting death to sleep suggests the inevitable end of all that forward-looking.
-
-
“Rising Five” Speaker
-
The speaker of "Rising Five" is an older person. All the reader knows about this person is that they have lived long enough to know what people generally are like. By keeping the speaker anonymous, the poem makes its message universal. Any reader can likely identify with the speaker's description of struggling to live in the moment.
This speaker also seems to be someone who sees a lot of beauty in the world, from the spring trees "swilled with green" to the sweetness of the little boy with his "toffee-buckled" cheeks. Perhaps it's for this reason that the speaker seems to suffer over how hard it is to really live life, rather than looking forward to whatever might be about to happen next.
The speaker is at once idealistic and realistic. While this person can feel the power and value of life in the present, they're also resigned to the human reality of forward-looking anxiety—seeing it even in an innocent child.
-
-
“Rising Five” Setting
-
"Rising Five" is set in a lush spring meadow. It's the month of May, and the new leaves are out on the trees, replacing the blossoms of early spring. Everything seems to be overflowing with new green life. This gorgeous landscape carries with it a darker undercurrent: even as the speaker looks around at all this beauty, they begin to feel the way that all life leads toward death (and all the faster because of how difficult it is for people to live in the present moment). Images of rotting fruit evoke this landscape's eventual decay. But there's also a hint of hope here; spring, after all, always returns.
-
-
Literary and Historical Context of “Rising Five”
-
Literary Context
Norman Nicholson (1914-1987) was, like Thomas Hardy before him, a writer whose work was intimately connected to the countryside where he spent his life. Nicholson almost never left the small town in the north of England where he was born, and his poetry's plain language and natural settings reflect his deep roots in English landscapes and culture.
Nicholson saw himself as an inheritor of the earlier Romantic tradition. Like Wordsworth, he was a Lake District writer interested in the influence of nature on the human soul, and he similarly believed that simple, colloquial language was the best way to communicate the deepest insight. He also shared Wordsworth's interest in childhood, and poems like "We Are Seven" could be read as direct ancestors of "Rising Five." Remote from the fantastical lyricism of Yeats or the stylized modernism of T.S. Eliot, Nicholson's work didn't really fit in with the dominant poetic movements of the time, though he did appreciate W.H. Auden's wit.
Like all too many poets, Nicholson was deeply influenced by illness. He contracted tuberculosis as a young man, and his long stay in a sanatorium intensified his Christian beliefs. A number of his poems set Bible stories in his hometown, in a style that might be compared to the paintings of his contemporary Stanley Spencer (who depicted scenes of prophecy and resurrection in the little town of Cookham).
A successful poet in his own lifetime, though never too widely known, Nicholson was awarded an OBE ("Order of the British Empire") for his contributions to literature.
Historical Context
Much of Norman Nicholson's poetry and life philosophy were developed in the context of hard rural lives. The people of the small English town where Nicholson was born made their living from the coal-mining industry—an essential cog in the workings of the Industrial Revolution (which Nicholson was born at the tail end of), but almost defunct by the end of his life.
Coal mining was incredibly taxing and dangerous work. Aside from having to spend much of their lives in the dark underground, miners often died from cave-ins, explosions, or asphyxiation. (Nicholson's own uncle was killed in a mining accident.) But things got even worse for the miners as the 20th century progressed and the mining industry collapsed. Nicholson saw his community move from modest working-class prosperity to poverty and desperation. By the time he died, coal miners had become emblems of English class struggle.
-
-
More “Rising Five” Resources
-
External Resources
-
The Nicholson Society Newsletter — Visit the University of Lancaster's Nicholson website, with archives and resources.
-
A Reading of the Poem — Hear "Rising Five" read aloud by the scholar Iain McGilchrist.
-
A Short Biography — Read a brief overview of Nicholson's life and work.
-
The Norman Nicholson Society — A website by and for Norman Nicholson enthusiasts, with more information about Nicholson's life and work.
-
Interviews and Readings — Hear recordings of interviews with Nicholson and discussions of his poetry.
-
-
