But to the grandmother the antiques have great importance. They are 'needed', though never 'used' - they are a substitute for human company, a replacement for love. She takes pride in her possession of them; the speaker's 'wish not to be used/ Like antique objects' is a wish not to be accorded the same kind of attention the antiques receive - and though the grandmother can see her own reflection in the antiques, she is denied the chance to see it in her granddaughter (someone whom we might expect to reflect her). In fact, beneath the images of polish, silver and brass lies someone who can be 'hurt', who feels though never speaks about how she feels, and who comes to be 'frail'; the poem deals with the speaker's complex response to this realisation.
The grandmother's life is bound up with the antiques even after she no longer keeps the shop. They accompany her to the 'long, narrow room' in which she essentially waits to die. This third stanza is full of unattractive images - shadows, the smell of absence, things too long shut up - yet the speaker still has to acknowledge that, to her grandmother, they represent 'all her best things'. This imagery sums up the lfe of a person who has been defined by her antiques - 'the smell of absences' suggests the memories that the grandmother attaches to these objects, but it also hints at an unfulfilled existence, while 'the shadows.../ That can't be polished' suggest the grandmother's loss of her habitual control as she nears death (a state itself often associated with shadow), and are a disturbingly vague image.
In the poem's final image, 'the new dust falling through the air', Jennings economically suggests the grandmother's joining of the antiques she devoted her life to. But this image simultaneously reminds us of her absence from the room she once haunted - there is new dust there where once there would only have been polish. The speaker recalls, in this final stanza, her feelings about the death - not grief but guilt. The poem as a whole is characterized by the honesty of its attempt to look back, as an adult, on a relationship that, as a child, was bound up with feelings of fear and guilt. There is no attempt to make excuses on either side, or to sentimentalize the grandmother now that she is dead; only in the poignancy of some of the images and in the speaker's need to return to events of long ago can we perhaps detect the lasting impression this woman has made on her, in spite of herself.
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MY GRANDMOTHER by Elizabeth Jennings
I think that the poem "My Grandmother" is about an old women who has an awkward relationship with her grandchild. I believe that they would have had a better relationship if the women didn’t spend her whole life devoted to this one antique shop. I think this kept her from everything that was on the outside of the walls of the antique shop.
This is why maybe we get the feeling that the old women doesn’t have any friends and maybe that is why she has never tried to develop the relationship further with the grandchild.
I believe that the women has not ever felt warmth or has never kept on to the memories she once had before because in the poem it says;
"....the faded silks and the heavy furniture "
I think that this gives us the impression that everything she once had has gone and faded away with the furniture. In stanza two I think that the child may be feels guilty about never doing anything with the women. She recollects one event where she refused to go out with her grandmother causing the adult much distress and embarrassment. I think that she was afraid of her grandmother, perhaps of her coldness. Although you can see this in the stanza I still believe that the child was right to refuse because I think that the women is treating the girl like she was an antique;
"It was perhaps I think a wish not to be used
like antique objects ...."
In stanza three I think that you can see all the memories actually being revealed to the grandchild;
"All her best things in one tong narrow room"
It gives us the sense that after she had passed away now the guilt is just kicking in and the old women’s life has just began to open.
In the very last stanza I think that the very last chapter in the old women’s life is beginning to come to an end. Nothing is left in memory of her:
"..and no finger marks were there"
I think that now her life is over and that her family have been excluded, their lives have had a fundamental change and new dust had just began to settle over the rather cold possessions she seemd to value over her children and grandchildren.
