The poem 'Mother, any distance...' explores the ideas of loss and change. Compare the ideas presented by Simon Armitage here with one poem my Carol Ann Duff and two from the pre-1914 bank.

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Thursday 28th January 2005

Timed Essay (1hour)

The poem ‘Mother, any distance…’ explores the ideas of loss and change. Compare the ideas presented by Simon Armitage here with one poem my Carol Ann Duff and two from the pre-1914 bank.

The poem ‘Mother, any distance’, by Simon Armitage is from a collection of poems titled ‘Book of Matches’; it is meant to be read in the time it takes a match to burn, and thus cannot be very long. The poem is written in the first person, though it is not specific as to whether it is from the perspective of a man or woman, which indeed could be a result of deliberate ambiguity, or alternatively, it could be Simon Armitage himself. The speaker, apparently in a house he or she is about to move into, is measuring ‘windows, pelmets, doors’ with their mother, who has ‘come to help’ as they need ‘a second pair of hands’. The technique of enjambment is used throughout the poem, and rhyming couplets appear in the third and fourth lines of the first stanza; ‘doors’ and ‘floors’.

A sense of adventure is evoked in the last line of the first stanza, with descriptions of seemingly normal and unremarkable things such as ‘walls’ and ‘floors’ including adjectives such as ‘acres’ and ‘prairies’; this is also where the poem departs from direct reality. These images of vast space indicate the speaker’s excitement of leaving home, and it is here that the theme of change is first addressed within the poem. While the speaker’s mother stands in the same place holding one end of the measuring tape ‘recording length’, i.e. taking responsibility, the speaker explores the house, ‘reporting metres’. Here the speaker is made to still seem very young and not used to becoming completely independent, and is not completely sure of themselves; ‘back to base’, showing that they still return to their mother to make sure what they have done is right, looking for approval.

The first three lines of the second stanza are completely literal, as with the first three lines of the first stanza, but once again in the fourth line the issue of change is brought up again; ‘unreeling years between us’. The measuring tape does not literally unreel years between the two characters, but is a metaphor for the growing distance between them as the speaker becomes less and less dependent on their mother. Eventually the limit of the measuring tape is reached, and the speaker reaches ‘towards a hatch’ that opens on an ‘endless sky’.  This evokes images of possibilities, and thus once again of change, in a positive light particularly because of the word ‘endless’. An internal rhyming scheme is present in this final stanza; ‘inch’, ‘pinch’, ‘sky’ and ‘fly’.

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‘Mother, any distance’ looks at the connection, which is an emotional one, between a mother and her child; the measuring tape is a metaphor for this. Another type of imagery is given in the second stanza of an ‘anchor’ and ‘kite’; the mother can be assumed to be the anchor. This gives the speaker a sense of security, and the idea of being a kite leads to the idea of freedom, and being free. Similarly however, this can have the adverse effect as the speaker could be seen as trapped and unable to fulfil their true potential, but as the ...

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