The poem is monotonous; this implies that the mother does not feel happy about her work, and is getting weary of it, but does it because she has to. She would have to clean her doorstep because of a law passed in 1666 that said you had to clean your steps before 6A.M. The Victorians would have been more determined to keep to this law than people in society these days.
The poem has a sense of order, and the word “And” is often repeated, as to imply that the mother has a lot to do, and it makes it sound more boring. “And then I must scrub, and bake, and sweep.”
The relationship between the mother and children is a conventional one. The mother works while her children get on with life, and she seems happy with this.
In “My Father thought it Bloody Queer” it is not a parent child relationship portrayed, but a father son relationship. This is because the son is twenty nine, “At twenty nine, it comes as no surprise to hear...” The son might be twenty nine, but in his father’s eyes he is still a little child, so he feels he can boss his son around. We assume the boy is younger than he is, because his age is only specified in the last stanza, and his father treats him younger than he really is.
The son appears to be going through a rebellion, as his father does not seem happy that he has done this, so it is a rebellion against the way he was brought up, and his parents.
The father reflects his disappointment in his son as he followed fashion rather than his father’s values and the way he was brought up. His father has traditional values, but the son doesn’t seem to care about them, so he senses regret.
The relationship between the two people in this poem is a disciplined one, unlike “The Song of the Old Mother,” but it is conventional like the poem. Where as “Before You Were Mine” is not disciplined or conventional. Therefore it is very different to this poem.
The poem “Before You Were Mine” seems to imply that the mother is young, free and single, and then she has a baby and possesses it. This is not true if you read through the poem, in fact it is the daughter who then possesses her mother. “Before you were mine, your Ma stands at the close...” This is also shown by “The decade before my loud, possessive yell...” This line also symbolises the end of the mother’s freedom.
The mother seems to be flirty, frivolous, lively, and the centre of attention in the pictures her daughter is looking at. Her daughter compares her to Marilyn Munroe, so the woman must have been very glamorous.
The girl wants a life like her mother’s, she wants to have fun like she did, but she can’t because it is out of her character. Her memories of her mother are fading “I see you, clear as scent, under the tree.” The relationship is a controversial one, the mother is dead, but before she died her daughter seemed close to her, which is different to both the other poems. The other poems are conventional and have a sense of discipline, but this one doesn’t seem to have any of these.
