Material

Question 1

What are the themes running throughout this poem?

Answer 1

Memory, family, childhood, nostalgia, movement of time, grief and motherhood

Question 2

What device is used in throughout?

Answer 2

Synecdoche of handkerchief - representative of more traditional, less disposable past

Question 3

What are the two meanings?

Answer 3

Something literal, tangible or something more complex, fabric of society

Question 4

What device is used in ‘hanky meant a thing of cloth/not paper tissues’?

Answer 4

Immediate juxtaposition between significance and insignificance / disposable vs something that lasts

Question 5

What device is used in ‘spittle and scrubbed against my face’ ?

Answer 5

Sibliance - despite nostalgia speaker also remembers annoyance of being hassled - duality

Question 6

What can be inferred through ‘embroidered with a V for Viv’?

Answer 6

Something more substantial as the proper noun suggests value

Question 7

What device is used in ‘she had a farm up there’?

Answer 7

Metaphor - mother as caring provider

Question 8

What device is used in ‘her own; I never did’?

Answer 8

The caesura is emphatic of separation between mother and speaker, modernism vs traditionalism, past vs present highlighting differences in parenting styles

Question 9

What device is used in ‘Hankies were presents from distant aunts/ in boxed sets, with transparent covers/ and script initials, spelling ponce,/ the naffest Christmas gifts you’d get’ ?

Answer 9

Asyndetic lisiting - colloquialism, critiques past, past is meaningful or past as not desirable

Question 10

What device is used in ‘and larger, like they had more snot’?

Answer 10

Simile - alluding to the patriarchy that perhaps men have more problems? more to cry about? more serious?- comedic mocking

Question 11

What device is used in ‘you’d never find today in malls. ‘ ?

Answer 11

End stop in the middle of stanza, emphatic of shift in generation/time

Question 12

What device is used in ‘step-together, step-together, step-together’ ?

Answer 12

Repetition emphatic of the structured rigidity of the past

Question 13

What device is used in ‘Nostalgia only makes me old.’?

Answer 13

End stop, shift in perspective, back to reality, feels a sense of grief/ nostalgia isn’t helpful

Question 14

What can be inferred through ‘was killed in TV lassitude’?

Answer 14

Technology perhaps encourages the death of tradition, perhaps modernity has changed things

Question 15

What device is used in ‘And it was me that turned it on’ ?

Answer 15

Conjunction emphatic of her self criticism continued thought perhaps a critique of her mothering style

Question 16

What device is used in ‘and eat bought biscuits I would bake’?

Answer 16

Plosives - aggressive self criticism of her parenting

Question 17

What device is used in ‘There’s never a hanky up my sleeve.’?

Answer 17

End stop and negator feed into critique, parallelism drawn between herself and mother

Question 18

What can be inferred in ‘the kind whose noses strangers clean’?

Answer 18

Contrast between personal pronoun and ambiguous language perhaps lack of meaning in modern society vs traditional

Question 19

What device is used in ‘I miss material handkerchiefs’?

Answer 19

Extended metaphor - tone of deep fried, missing her mother/ living in the past

Question 20

What device is used in ‘But, it isn’t mine’?

Answer 20

Argument marker and caesura perhaps emphatic of resolution/ acceptance of reality