Themes
English Lit: AQA GCSE Poetry - Love & Relationships, topic 11.1.2
Measuring Tape
In Mother, Any Distance, the measuring tape becomes a metaphor for the relationship between mother and son.
Symbols?
- There are several possible interpretations of what the measuring tape could represent.
- It might be symbolic of the passage of time, as the son grows up - ‘the line still feeding out, unreeling years between us. Anchor. Kite’.
- But it could also represent an umbilical cord (the cord that joins a mother and child in the womb) that once connected them.
Growing up
- The poem also explores the process of growing up and letting go through the measuring tape metaphor.
- The mother is at the zero–end - she is the fixed point at the beginning of the narrator's life, and he must now make the decision to move on, but risk the unknown outcome of adulthood.
Instability
The poem explores the narrator's feelings of instability as he has to leave the security of childhood and grow up.
Hyperbole
- The narrator uses hyperbole (exaggeration) when he describes the past distance between them – although he is only moving around a house, he uses words like ‘acres’ and ‘prairies’.
- This perhaps shows how worried the narrator is about growing up and leaving his mother behind.
- The final line voices his concerns about whether he will 'fall or fly' - two dramatic extremes.
Thin connection
- The measuring tape also represents a thin and fragile connection.
- This hints at the distance between the mother and son and the instability in their relationship, as the narrator stretches further and further away from his mother.
Test yourself on Themes
Which of these is NOT something the measuring tape symbolises in Mother, Any Distance?
What might the measuring tape symbolise in Mother, Any Distance?
Which techniques highlight the narrator's feelings of instability in Mother, Any Distance?