Effects - Alan Jenkins Flashcards
Title
- poem is about the effects on the family such as melancholy and regret
‘I held her hand, that was always scarred From chopping, slicing,’
- physical touch
- the idea of trauma
‘scrubbing’
- active verbs, domestic - violent undertones
‘cooked’
semantic field of cooking - nurturing
‘taken off her rings’
- symbolistic of commitment
- reminiscent with physical objects
‘and her watch?’
- taking off - deterioration of mental state, removal of organisation
- symbolism of watches and time - Fordism
‘Chops or chicken portions, English, bland, Familiar flavours she said she preferred To whatever “funny foreign stuff” Young people seemed to eat these days,’
- 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
‘started unseeing’
- automatic and emotionless
- evocative and metaphorical
‘inner weather’
- pathetic fallacy - inner so only affects her
‘drink after drink’
- diacope - sense of increasing and unending mundanity
‘the scotch’
polysyndectic posting, suggests inevitability of these actions
‘psychiatric ward’
suggests a change of mindset, compared to what the speaker was recounting
‘blinked unseeing’
continuation of the ‘unseeing’ nature of the mother demonstrated mental deterioration
‘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…’
- polysyndetic listing
‘On the hand I held, a blotched and crinkled hand Whose fingers couldn’t clasp at mine’
- the idea of physical touch changes the initially violent verbs
- links to the beginning
‘Please don’t leave But of course I left; now I was back,’
- direct speech from the mother
- sense of begging
- caesura acts as a time strip that separates life and death
‘A nurse bring the little bag of her effects to me.’
- 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
Overall messages
- 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
Structure
- 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