Mother, any distance greater
than a single span
requires a second pair of hands.
You come to help me measure
windows, pelmets, doors,
the acres of the walls, the
prairies of the floors.
You at the zero-end, me with the
spool of tape, recording
length, reporting metres,
centimetres back to base, then leaving
up the stairs, the line still
feeding out, unreeling
years between us. Anchor. Kite.
I space-walk through the empty
bedrooms, climb
the ladder to the loft, to
breaking point, where something
has to give;
two floors below your fingertips
still pinch
the last one-hundredth of an
inch...I reach
towards a hatch that opens on an
endless sky
to fall or fly.
----Simon Armitage----
For this week’s edition of Poems Concentrated, I’ve been
taking inspiration from the GCSE literature curriculum. You can find really nice poems that have, I
believe, been shadowed from people’s eyes by levelling it out as school work.
Not good. You might also notice that this edition is a bit more technical,
going deeper in analysis. Don’t worry, it won’t always be like this, just one
in few.
The reason why I chose this one among the many available, is
because this one quite frankly surprised me with amount of information hidden
between the words. Sure, it was meant to have this, being school work, but I
wasn’t expecting it, after all it is GCSE stuff. I’ll also be giving my own summary/analysis,
considering that the official website has pretty much the same information and
also to just to recycle my own work.
So, the poem looks to the point doesn’t it? I mean, here’s a
boy measuring distances in his (new) house with his mother. Here and there, you
can sense a bit of sadness, regret and gratitude too. But read on to see more!
Now, considering that I am giving my own summary, I’ll add it in the middle and emphasize it from there on:
The poem is about a young man,
who is now moving house to start living an adult life. The poem tries to
describe the mixed feelings that occur on both sides as a child grows up. It
explores the complex relationship between the mother and son, their feelings and
their lives, while apparently describing decorating/ planning-out the new house.
Okay, that’s a bit scarce. Well, that is a compression of
all the information you can find in the poem, mind you.
Now, to elaborate on the whole mother-child relationship,
and look at it from this point; the poem represents the stages of growing up.
In the beginning, he describes how he requires his mother’s help, ‘…second
pair of hands’ and liken that to a young child requiring help from a
parent. Then he says ‘You come to help me measure windows, pelmets, doors, the
acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors’, this can be seen as the
way a parent help a child identify their surroundings. Go deeper there, and you
can see the word windows, doors, acres of walls, prairies of floors. These
words all have/ can be seen to have a metaphorical meaning. Windows, can be
seen as a boundary between inside and outside a house, where a mother has to educate a
child on how to stay safe in the wide world. Doors, I regard to mean, doors to opportunities.
Acres of walls could refer to the many boundaries a person meets in their lives,
and acres of floors could refer to the largeness of the world, the immenseness.
The second stanza represents the teenage/ young adult years,
where the child ventures out, but always need the mother ‘at the end of the
tape’ to come back to. The years go on, their lives drift apart, and the link
fades, but some part of it will still remain. The words Anchor/ kite, of course, refer to
this, the mother being the anchor, holding down, the permanent figure; the child the
drifter, the kite, who is still always connected to the anchor by the string that
holds it down, no matter how he tries to fly away.
The last stanza of course the next stage of life where the
mother doesn’t get to play such a large part. The poet ‘spacewalks’ (anchor/kite
relationship comes into mind, where he is a spaceman but always connected to
the ship by a cord) through the rest of pre-adulthood, and then ‘something has
to give’; his mother who still nevertheless holds onto a tiny part of the cord,
‘a hundredth of an inch’. Then finally, the gateway to the rest of life, ‘the
hatch that opens to an endless sky’. And from there on it is up to him to ‘fly
or fall’ in life.
The poem is seemingly a vent to all these feeling the child
had.
Maybe I went a bit too far with the analysis, but hey, I can’t
let good information that I spent time on finding just lay about in my brain.
Plus I guess I found a bit more stuff in this investigation to add to my
original one. I’ve probably never given so much information that I found myself
on this blog, and I think I’m supposed to feel proud or something, but no, I
feel like I like the old ‘poem, ‘fun’, ‘summary’ and ‘bye!’ version of Poems Concentrated better. But I just
want to try and do some analysis myself, because after all, I do run this
series on great poems. Normally, I do hate digging about in words for
information, but it’s something that must be done, and it’s better to know that
some other people can also benefit from it, or at least enjoy the read while I
do it.
That brings me on to the end of this edition. I’m going to
go over a 1000 words, and I always try to keep beneath 1000. And let me take
this moment to thank everyone who has been reading and sharing my blog, even
though this is probably the 10th time or so I’m doing it. I’ve
passed 3650 views and this only the second post after I said I just passed 3k
views. Thanks readers! :-D
That’s the end. Hope you enjoyed this week’s Edition, and if
so, please do share it, and follow the blog! I’ve rearranged the format, and it’s
the first thing about this post! It says ‘Follow my blog! You’ll love it!’. I’m sorry about the horrible format I’d been
running before, but now its all clear now!
Thanks for reading! :-D
The previous Editions:
Check out my
stories:
Crash, a short
story: http://interestconcentrated.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/crash-short-story.html
1:49, a horror
story: http://interestconcentrated.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/0149-pm.html
My Baked in Irony
series:
Engrossing, a twisted short tale of irony: http://interestconcentrated.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/engrossing.html
Sorry…..
Noticed….
Check out
Rayhaan's stories:
Or just check out
everything in the order they came out in by clicking this:
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