Poetry, Year 11: Follower, Mother, any distance and Before You Were Mine (Love and Relationships option)

He ploughs the fields with a pair of horses

HintA traditional way of working, using animals.

The whyThe father is presented as an expert. His shoulders, the horses, the blade and the furrows are described with admiration.

It describes step by step how he sets the blade, cuts the furrows and turns the horses with one tug

HintThe poet lingers over each part of the work.

The whyThe long, exact description of the work is a form of praise. The father seems to do it easily, which is part of what the child admires.

He stumbles along behind, sometimes falling, and wants to be a farmer like him

HintHe copies his father but cannot keep up.

The whyAt times his father picks him up and carries him. The boy pictures himself shutting an eye and steering the plough as his father does, but he never takes it up.

Now the father is old and keeps stumbling after his son, and the son cannot get rid of him

HintThe roles in the first stanza are swapped.

The whyThe boy who once followed is followed by his father. The last lines leave a mix of irritation, love and sadness about a parent who is ageing.

6

HintEach is a block of four lines.

The whyThe six quatrains rhyme in a pattern, and the rhythm is something like a ballad, which gives the poem a steady, walking beat.

Measuring the rooms, windows and doors of a new home, with the mother holding the far end of the tape

HintA tool for working out sizes, held at two ends.

The whyThe mother has come to help her grown-up child move in. The ordinary task is the setting for a poem about family ties.

The tie between parent and child, like an umbilical cord

HintIt connects two people at its two ends.

The whyAs it unrolls, the tape stretches between them, and a kite on a string is another image of the same idea. The child can go further because the mother is holding on.

7

HintA sonnet would end a line sooner.

The whyThe extra line stretches the form just as the tape stretches. It comes from a sequence of sonnets by Armitage, in his collection Book of Matches.

Holding the other end tightly, two floors below

HintThe tie is at its tightest at this point.

The whyThe speaker looks out of the attic window at the open sky and does not know what will happen next. The mother stays at the bottom, steady, so the speaker can leave without losing the link.

That a person can go out into the world and still be held by the parent

HintBoth going away and holding on are part of the picture.

The whyThe kite and the anchor images say the same: freedom and safety together. Leaving does not cut the tie but stretches it.

10

HintA decade.

The whyThe speaker imagines her mother as a carefree young woman in the years before she was born. These are the years the poem treasures.

Glasgow

HintIt is the largest city in Scotland.

The whyThe poem is set in 1950s Glasgow, and the speaker names a square in the city where she imagines she sees her mother's ghost.

The mother's lost youthful glamour and freedom

HintShe remembers pushing her hands into them as a child.

The whyThe speaker remembers putting her hands into the shoes as a child. They are objects from a time that ended when she arrived.

That mothers had lives and identities of their own before their children, and give up some of them

HintThe poem is a tribute and a quiet apology.

The whyThe speaker honours who her mother was before motherhood, and admits her own arrival cost her mother some of that life. The tone is loving, not blaming.

5

HintThe stanzas are all equal in length.

The whyThe poem uses no rhyme and no regular rhythm, which suits the free-spirited mother and the easy, open way the speaker talks about her.