Effects - Alan Jenkins

Question 1

Title

Answer 1

• poem is about the effects on the family such as melancholy and regret

Question 2

‘I held her hand, that was always scarred From chopping, slicing,’

Answer 2

• physical touch
• the idea of trauma

Question 3

‘scrubbing’

Answer 3

• active verbs, domestic - violent undertones

Question 4

‘cooked’

Answer 4

semantic field of cooking - nurturing

Question 5

‘taken off her rings’

Answer 5

• symbolistic of commitment
• reminiscent with physical objects

Question 6

‘and her watch?’

Answer 6

• taking off - deterioration of mental state, removal of organisation
• symbolism of watches and time - Fordism

Question 7

‘Chops or chicken portions, English, bland, Familiar flavours she said she preferred To whatever “funny foreign stuff” Young people seemed to eat these days,’

Answer 7

• food/ nurture, fricative alliteration poet juxtaposes the idea with distance
• comment on class
• ‘funny foreign stuff’ - speaker may feel short-changed from not being abroad

Question 8

‘started unseeing’

Answer 8

• automatic and emotionless
• evocative and metaphorical

Question 9

‘inner weather’

Answer 9

• pathetic fallacy - inner so only affects her

Question 10

‘drink after drink’

Answer 10

• diacope - sense of increasing and unending mundanity

Question 11

‘the scotch’

Answer 11

polysyndectic posting, suggests inevitability of these actions

Question 12

‘psychiatric ward’

Answer 12

suggests a change of mindset, compared to what the speaker was recounting

Question 13

‘blinked unseeing’

Answer 13

continuation of the ‘unseeing’ nature of the mother demonstrated mental deterioration

Question 14

‘To drown some “poor soul’s” moans and curses, And she took her pills and blinked and stared As the others shuffled around, and drooled, and swore…’

Answer 14

• polysyndetic listing

Question 15

‘On the hand I held, a blotched and crinkled hand Whose fingers couldn’t clasp at mine’

Answer 15

• the idea of physical touch changes the initially violent verbs
• links to the beginning

Question 16

‘Please don’t leave But of course I left; now I was back,’

Answer 16

• direct speech from the mother
• sense of begging
• caesura acts as a time strip that separates life and death

Question 17

‘A nurse bring the little bag of her effects to me.’

Answer 17

• effects are little suggesting that she failed to have a large influence on the speaker’s life
  two interpretations:
  1. the nurses is handing them their mothers stuff
  2. the effect that the mother has had on the speaker

Question 18

Overall messages

Answer 18

• explored the inner monologue that goes on after a loved one has died
• the narrator reminisces about the lives of his parents, especially his mother and the great change that has come about

Question 19

Structure

Answer 19

• single stanza - a sense of being overwhelmed, indicates the relationship between speaker and mother
• inconsistent rhythm - provides closure for the speaker as they become more at peace with their relationship
• variety of punctuation - sense of confusion, some interjection from mother which mimics the structure of memory - stream of consciousness