Contextual stuff

In Victor Hugo's French novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasimodo is the deformed hunchback forced to live in the bell tower of Notre Dame cathedral. Quasimodo lives in sheltered ignorance as the bell keeper until he falls in love with the gipsy Esmerelda. When Esmerelda dies, Quasimodo breaks into her tomb, and lying beside his beloved, eventually dies of starvation. When their bodies are later excavated, their skeletons are found entwined, symbolising their eternal love.

The name Quasimodo is both an allusion to a religious feast day and also a Latin pun; 'quasi' means part or almost and as Hugo points out, this is a fitting name for his disabled character:

He baptized his adopted child and called him Quasimodo; whether it was that he chose thereby to commemorate the day when he had found him, or that he meant to mark by that name how incomplete and imperfectly molded the poor little creature was. Indeed, Quasimodo, one-eyed, hunchbacked, and bow-legged, could hardly be considered as anything more than an almost.

(Hugo Penguin edition 1996 pp.147-148)

 

Theme

Prejudice, 'normality', deformity, alienation, outsiders

Language/imagery

The first stanza juxtaposes the speaker's love for the bells with society's disgust for the 'village runt'. The personification of the bells and the speaker's admiration for their 'generous bronze throats' is contrasted with the description of the speaker as 'name-called', 'hare-lipped' and 'sweet-tempered'; the tripling of compound adjectives emphasises the dual nature of the child who is both human and other, while the inanimate bells are depicted as wholly human. The tripling of present participle verbs 'gargling,' 'chanting', 'calming' imbue the bells with life and vitality while the young girl is described as 'name-called, stunted, lame, hare-lipped'; the asyndetic listing and past-participles create an irregular pace, the reader stumbles over the words, imitating the halting, lopsided movement of the child and countless cinematic portrayals of Quasimodo.

'fat, stung calves'

monochromatic 'shadow', 'black' 'silver' 'grey lead' 'blue' - colours associated with melancholy

Structure

The poem is written in free verse, thus the form reflects the themes of the poem as the structure itself is irregular and uncontrolled.