On her blindness Flashcards
1
Q
Disability, Stoicism, and Suffering
A
- “On Her Blindness” explores the way that people cope with disability—or don’t. When the speaker’s mother loses her sight, she finds it almost impossible to manage not just because her life is exceedingly difficult but because the world wants her to stoically, quietly bear her suffering. “One should hide the fact that catastrophic handicaps / Are hell,” the speaker ironically remarks, observing that people without such handicaps are often too frightened to listen to what it’s like to suffer from them. Disability, this poem suggests, is only made more difficult by the world’s refusal to face the suffering and struggle it often entails.
- Everything in the speaker’s mother’s life becomes difficult and painful after she loses her vision. Struggling to “find the food on her plate with her fork” and “bumping into walls like a dodgem” (a bumper car), she’s left in constant humiliating frustration, embarrassed and unhappy. She’s so miserable that, as she confides to her son, she feels sure she’d “bump [her]self off” (kill herself) if she didn’t hold out hope of a cure.
2
Q
Loss, Pain, and Helplessness
A
- The poem’s speaker mourns for his mother twice: first when she loses her sight, then again when she dies. Watching her struggle with everyday life to the point that she contemplates suicide, the speaker feels totally “inadequate” to support her in her pain. By the time she dies, the speaker can find consolation only in the idea that her eyesight might have been restored in an afterlife, so that she might be “watching, somewhere, in the end.” In the face of some kinds of loss, the speaker reflects, people are utterly helpless: all that one can do is try to have hope that things might be different in another world.
- As the speaker’s mother struggles with daily life after her blindness, the speaker simply doesn’t know what to do. When she confides in him that her life is “living hell, to be honest,” and that she’s been tempted to kill herself, all that he feels he can say is “the usual sop”: empty consolations that make him feel “inadequate” and “locked-in,” unable to reach out and meaningfully help her. It’s deeply painful for him to watch her suffering; it’s even more painful that he can’t do anything about it.
3
Q
My mother could …
… in the fight.
A
- From the forceful alliterative /b/ sounds of “bear being blind” to the exasperated “to be honest,” these words suggest that the speaker is fed up with not being honest. This will be a poem about his mother’s blindness, yes, but also about how the wider world reacts to disability.
- All those little instructions about what “one” should or shouldn’t do make it clear that the speaker is mocking a common attitude. The tone here suggests that much of the world thinks it simply isn’t polite to admit to suffering deeply over a disability: such feelings, after all, make able-bodied people frightened and uncomfortable, forcing them to understand that one might not be totally all right after such a loss.
- Therefore, the speaker notes, the only people with disabilities “one tends to hear” from in public are those who “bear it / like a Roman”—in other words, those who stay as stoic as a Stoic. And of course, “bear[ing] being blind” is exactly what the speaker just said his mother can’t do; the repetition underscores her difficult predicament.
- The speaker will tell this story over the course of 23 stanzas of free verse, quiet and conversational as if he’s confiding in a friend. Notice that, while the poem uses no rhyme scheme or meter, the speaker does neatly divide his lines into roughly even lengths, often through sharp enjambments. The careful-but-jarring rhythm this creates feels rather like the movements of a newly blind person feeling their way around a room, bumping into unseen obstacles and coming to sudden abrupt pauses.
4
Q
She turned to …
… a pitch-black room)
A
- The speaker now recalls how his mother, unable to speak honestly about her blindness in most public places, confided in him about just how unhappy she was.
This memory takes place “in a Paris restaurant”—a place where one might expect to have a pretty good time. For the speaker’s mother, though, even a Parisian dinner is just another trial. She struggles to “find[] / the food on the plate with her fork”; notice how the strong alliterative /f/ sounds there evoke repeated unsuccessful stabs.
- Here, the speaker makes an aside to the reader, telling them that, if they want to imagine how difficult eating must have been for his mother, they should “try it / in a pitch-black room.” That aside reveals his empathy. He’s trying his best not just to look on in dismay at his mother’s struggles, but to really imagine what it must be like for her, to put himself in her shoes; he asks his readers to do the same.
5
Q
She kept her …
… laughed it off.
A
- While the speaker remembers that his mother “kept her dignity,” he also remembers her “bumping into walls like a dodgem”—that is, like a bumper car—and getting teased by her husband, who joked that she’d never had much of a “built-in compass,” even when she could see.
- The simile of the dodgem car and the gentle teasing here suggest that, after all, everyone in the speaker’s family is learning to “bear it like a Roman,” to take the mother’s blindness in stride—perhaps simply because there’s nothing else they can do besides sink into despair.
- These lines characterize the speaker’s family as affectionate and caring, but perhaps a little bit repressed, too. Like the consolations the speaker offered a few lines before, the father’s jokes might at once be genuinely loving and “inadequate” to the situation.
- Part of the difficulty of the mother’s blindness, this passage hints, is that it means she’s alone. No one can really reach her, and no one quite knows what to say. Blindness means her “sense / of direction” gets “cast / inward”; so does a lot of her emotional experience. The speaker knows that his mother is so miserable that she’d consider suicide if she didn’t hold onto “hope of a cure.” He thus knows, too, that when she “laugh[s…] off” her blindness with her family, she’s only “pretend[ing].”
6
Q
and whispered, …
… the locked-in son.
A
- The repetitions here make it easy to see how deep an impression these grim words made on the speaker: the language highlighted above appeared back in the poem’s first stanzas, when the speaker was telling readers the truth about his mother’s suffering.
- Notice, though, how complicated the tone is here. In a sense, the speaker’s mother is being stoic. Even as she admits that she’s suffering to the point that she’d consider suicide, her voice remains oddly casual, even darkly funny: to “bump [yourself] off,” for instance, isn’t what you’d call a somber description of suicide. The speaker’s mother is serious about her pain, but doing her best to bear what she “[cannot] bear,” too.
7
Q
Or saw things …
… blank as stone.
A
- Alone with her blindness, the speaker’s mother did her best to behave as if nothing had changed, covering for other people’s awkwardness or forgetfulness. Here, the poem’s irony becomes especially clear: sighted people forget to “see” the mother’s disability, metaphorically speaking.
- Of course, in some cases that’s understandable. The speaker remembers that his mother would smile and pretend to admire a grandchild’s “latest drawing” or “new toy,” a small illusion to keep her grandchildren happy and comfortable. However, she gets so good at this kind of pretending that the rest of her family begins to “forget, at times” that her eyesight is gone.
- Finally, though, the mother is completely blind, with a nasty finality. The simile of “a vision / as blank as stone” paints a picture of blindness as dungeonlike and claustrophobic, like being forced to stare at the same stone wall forever. That stone’s blankness might also suggest an uncarved tombstone, a grave that can’t even be marked. After all, the mother doesn’t have much chance to talk about her loss, and the people around her sometimes even forget that she can’t see.
8
Q
For instance, she’d …
… the wrong way.
A
- Pretending that she could still see, the speaker’s mother wasn’t just trying to keep her family comfortable. She was also trying to persuade herself that she wasn’t as impaired as she was.
- “Long after it was safe,” the speaker recalls, she used to drive the family car, the familiar “old Lanchester,” down windy country lanes. That recklessness suggests both the mother’s denial and her concealed despair: perhaps part of her just didn’t care too much whether she got in a crash.
- By leaving out any concluding conjunction (like an “and” or an “or”) from this list, the speaker creates a kind of verbal shrug: it’s as if he could go on at length listing more and more things his mother pretended to see and enjoy. This isn’t the half of it, he seems to say.
- This list also draws attention to all the simple pleasures that the speaker’s mother is locked out of. Her refusal to admit that she can’t see a thing here begins to suggest both pride and desperation. She’d rather keep on trying to do what she can’t than resign herself to her fate
9
Q
Her last week …
… lovely out there.”
A
- The speaker now remembers another specific encounter between him and his mother: a day when he went to visit her in the hospital during “her last week alive.” This, he says, was only “a fortnight back,” two weeks ago. The poem, in other words, has been a painfully immediate kind of mourning, written while the shock of the mother’s death was still fresh.
- This portrait of a gorgeous autumn day suggests richness, warmth, and wealth: metaphorically, the trees are “ablaze” like a roaring fire, the ground is “royal[ly]” decked out in robes of leaves, the weather is “golden.” This autumn day feels like a luxury, in other words. However, it’s also an ordinary, accessible, democratic kind of luxury: sometimes, a truly beautiful day just comes along for everybody to enjoy.
10
Q
Dying has made …
… in the end.
A
- That unchangeable fact, oddly enough, is what finally leads the speaker to a kind of hope. This whole poem has been about dealing with what can’t be changed, whether through denial, humor, or an occasional quiet declaration of pure unhappiness. Now, dealing with death—the ultimate unchangeable thing—the speaker decides that it’s “up to us,” up to his family, to “believe / she was watching, somewhere, in the end.”
- In other words, his mother’s death opens a tiny window of hope for the speaker and his family. Like many mourners before and since, they find themselves trying to believe that death might not have taken her away forever, but healed her: perhaps in an unknown afterlife somewhere, she’s conscious and she sees.
- This last line reaches back to the Milton sonnet the poem alludes to in its title. That poem’s last line, remember, is “They also serve who only stand and wait”—a statement of resignation to God’s will, but also, in its way, an expression of hope. Those who “wait” on God’s command, after all, are ultimately waiting for Heaven.
