On her blindness - Adam Thorpe

Question 1

Title

Answer 1

adaption of a famous Milton sonnet ‘on his blindness’ - 1655, after poets loss of sight

Question 2

‘My mother could not bear being blind, to be honest.’

Answer 2

• establishes the speakers mother’s condition
• colloquial language gives a familiar tone

Question 3

‘One should hide the fact that catastrophic handicaps’

Answer 3

• modal verb
• societal expectations of people to be silent and bear the illness with triumph

Question 4

‘She turned to me, once, in a Paris restaurant, still not finding the food on the plate with her fork, or not so that it stayed on(try it in a pitch-black room) and whispered, “It’s living hell, to be honest Adam.’

Answer 4

• stark contrast between heroism and pitty
• a reference to enclosed spaces - mother being trapped by disability
• shows connection between the pair

Question 5

‘the locked-in son.’

Answer 5

the son is trapped, also helpless in the situation, can’t provide his mother comfort

Question 6

‘She kept her dignity, though, even when bumping into walls like a dodgem;’

Answer 6

• park humour, likeable character that still has hope -simile
• satirical humour, forgives the idea of acceptance

Question 7

’ “No built-in compass,” as my father joked. Instead, she pretended to ignore the void, or laughed it off.’

Answer 7

• use of dialogue, gives a familiar tone, makes the speaker a likeable character
• ‘void’ - abstract noun - never-ending, the significance of her life being in decline as she gets older

Question 8

‘so we’d forget, at times, that the long, slow slide had finished in a vision as black as stone.’

Answer 8

• sibilance - long but difficult decline, readers’ empathy for the mother
• simile - inability to see, lack of figurative language and conversational familiar and inevitability of growing old

Question 9

‘She’d visit exhibitions, admire films, sink into television while looking the wrong way.’

Answer 9

• list of three - determinism to combat disability
• double meaning - literal and the sons unawareness of the mothers pain

Question 10

‘the autumn trees around the hospital ablaze with colour’

Answer 10

• autumn - what the mother has lost - the richness
• season change, evocative of a new beginning, but also decay

Question 11

‘forgetting’

Answer 11

how barely his mother carries her handicap, unaware of her silent battle

Question 12

‘no more sightless, but now she can’t pretend. Her eyelids were closed’

Answer 12

• irony of the speaker’s eyes being closed
• trapped, enclosed space
• cyclical - after life semantic imagery at the start

Question 13

‘she was watching, somewhere, in the end.’

Answer 13

• tragic loneliness of death and her departure from the family structure
• she had previously lost ability to see
• conforming fiction

Question 14

Overall messages

Answer 14

• idea of family and feeling of guilt and helplessness of ageing and the inevitability of death and suffering
• decline in mother’s ability to see and do everyday tasks, limited self-identity
• the lies we tell ourselves in the face of of fragility and ageing to save her or spare being a burden

Question 15

Structure

Answer 15

• repeated enjambment across both lines and stanzas
• hidden irregular structure - the integrated enjambment creates the uncertainty that his mother feels as a blind person
• no rhyme scheme