Summary, Structure & Form
English Lit: AQA GCSE Poetry - Love & Relationships, topic 11.1.1
Summary
Simon Armitage is known for his clearly structured and often dark poetry. In this poem, we see the action of a mother and son measuring spaces in a house becoming a metaphor for their relationship.
Background
- This poem comes from the Armitage’s Book of Matches.
- Armitage was born in Yorkshire.
- He was been influenced by early Modernist poets such as Ted Hughes, W.H. Auden and Philip Larkin.
- Like these poets, he uses everyday, emotional interactions to inspire his poetry.
Summary
- The action of the poem involves the narrator and his mother measuring space in a house.
- The mother figure holds the ‘zero-end’ of the measuring tape, while her son walks away from her unreeling the tape.
- The poem uses this simplistic plot as a base from which to explore the growth of children, and the changing relationship between mother and son.
Parent-child relationship
- In this poem, we see the action of a mother and son measuring spaces in a house becoming a metaphor for their relationship – the measuring tape symbolises the looming distance time has brought to their relationship.
- Armitage’s poem explores the pain of growing up, and growing away from our parents that Lewis’ poem (Walking Away) deals with. The difference is that Armitage's poem is from the child’s perspective.
- The child describes the delicate balance he has to walk to break away from his parents, without intentionally hurting them.
Structure and Form in Mother, Any Distance
Here are some of the key features of structure and form in Mother, Any Distance:
Rhyme scheme
- The poem has a regular structure for the first two stanzas, with a regular AABB rhyme scheme to match.
- But as the poem progresses, the structure disintegrates and the rhyme becomes irregular.
- This reflects the narrator’s state of insecurity, since he is unsure about how his relationship with his mother is going to change – will he ‘fall’ or ‘fly’?
A sonnet?
- This instability in the son is also shown by the way that Armitage changes the sonnet form – the poem essentially works like a sonnet with two quatrains and a sestet, but he adds an extra short line to the end of the poem, making it longer than normal.
- This final line is the moment of insecurity that Armitage wishes to highlight - so it seems fitting that it sticks out from the rest of the poem.
Test yourself on Summary, Structure & Form
In the poem, what action becomes a symbol for the parent-child relationship?
Which of these are true of Simon Armitage?
What does the measuring tape symbolise in Mother, Any Distance?
What is the form of a sonnet?
Which line of the poem Mother, Any Distance subverts the form of a sonnet?