Before you were mine by Carol Ann Duffy, Mother Any Distance by Simon Armitage, On my first Sonne by Ben Jonson and The Affliction of Margaret have very strong parent-child feelings.

‘Marilyn’ possibly showing she admired her mother then. The second stanza is when the poetic voice was a younger girl and refers to her mother as doing ‘stamping stars from the wrong pavement’ the word ‘wrong’ possibly showing she believed her mother was out of place. The third stanza refers to her mother now. This structure is contrasting to ‘Mother any distance’, because it uses the same amount of lines in each stanza whilst ‘Mother any distance uses uneven lines possibly showing the uncertainty of the poetic voice leaving home. Similar to ‘Before you were mine’ we see three stages in the poetic voice’s life. In the first stanza the Mother helps measure and we see her being helpful, but by the final stanza he takes the take measure possibly breaking their relationship. ‘The Affliction of Margaret’ is similar to ‘Before you were mine’, because it also uses a regular stanza form, but instead of four five line stanzas it uses eleven seven line stanzas. It starts as a question ‘Where art thou’, which shows that the mother is very distraught and she has lost her son, possibly showing despite her son being dead, she still has deep feelings for him. ‘On my first Sonne’ is written in one stanza as twelve lines, which makes it an unfinished sonnet. The lack of the final two lines possibly shows that the amount of grief he has received from losing his son makes it very hard to write poetry, showing a deep emotional relationship. Despite both of these poems having a similar theme of losing a child, ‘On my first Sonne’ is a lot shorter and possibly showing the poetic voice has less grief than ‘The Affliction of Margaret’. In ‘Mother Any Distance’ the poetic voices use an ongoing metaphor of a tape and by the end of the poem, it reaches ‘breaking point’ possibly showing that the relationship between the mother and son has to end here and the son’s independence breaks free from the mother. After this it reaches ‘Pinch, on hundred of an inch’, which shows the mother is very unhappy that the poetic voice is reaching independence and is preventing him even though he is so close. The word ‘Pinch’ has quite a negative dictation showing she is doing everything she can not to let go from her son. However, in ‘Before you were mine’ instead of the poetic voice writing about the ending of a relationship between the mother and child, it is more about memories of relationships. The phrase ‘clear as any scent’ uses a simile to show just how clearly she can see her mother and the paradoxical form of seeing and smell show powerful remembrance. These two poems also use colloquial language to express relationships. In ‘Before you were mine’ the poetic voice’s grandmother says to her mother ‘and whose small bites on your neck, sweetheart’ shows she her grandmother is directly talking to her mother showing a personal relationship. In ‘Mother Any Distance’ there is a less personal feel to it as there is no direct speech just an uneven line format. ‘The Affliction of Margaret’ uses a lot of imagery to communicate her feelings of love for her child. She uses a lot of imagery such as ‘I dread the rustling of the grass’, which makes us image with her, due to the uses of sensory language of vision and hearing. It is also an everyday image, which makes us believe it more and helps us relate to her despair and love. ‘On my first Sonne’ does not use imagery but instead an extended metaphor as his Son being a loan to him from God and he died, because he had to finally pay back the loan as everything belongs to God. When Johnson wrote this, it was a common thought that everything did belong to God. ‘On my first Sonne’ also uses very simple and direct language such as ‘Will man lament the state’, which shows he is very direct with his emotions, while ‘The Affliction of Margaret’ uses a lot of figurative language and imagery, possibly showing she wants to hide her grief. ‘Before you were mine’ and ‘Mother any distance’ both uses assonance on the vowels to show the relationship. ‘Before you were mine’ stresses the ‘ee’ sounds, for example ‘then leaving, up the stairs, the line still feeding out’. This sound sounds like the tape being pulled and possibly straining, which emphasises the end of the mother/son relationship. ‘Before you were mine’ uses assonance on the ‘o’ sound, ‘I wanted the bold girl… Portobello.’ which expresses emotions, possibly showing the poetic voice longing to be like her mother. Therefore, we can see that these four poems show very strong feelings between the parents and children. The ‘Affliction of Margaret’ and ‘On my First Sonne’, despite both being about the loss of a child possibly show that the poetic voice in ‘On my First Sonne’ is directly facing the loss of their child, while the poetic voice in ‘The Affliction of Margaret’ is not so direct and keeps questioning her loss, due to the amount of questions. ‘Before you were mine’ and ‘Mother any distance’ both deal with mother-child relationships. ‘Mother any distance’ firstly appears as being a good relationship, but I believe that the breaking of the tape possibly shows the mother controls the son and he wants it to stop. ‘Before you were mine’ shows the poetic voice is quite controlling over the mother especially when the poetic voice spies on the mother’s childhood possibly showing jealously, but admiration.