Siddharth Nair      

                                                                                                                          11 IB          

Commentary on ‘Two hands’ by Jon Stallworthy

              The poem ‘Two hands’, by Jon Stallworthy compares the hands of the persona with those of his father. The son is the voice of the poem and he describes the difference between his father’s hand and his hand. Although these hands are physically similar, expressed in the line “hands so alike – spade palms…” the personalities of owners of the hands, are very different. The title itself, the ‘Two Hands’, represents the two different personalities of the father and the son. The son on one hand, appears to be a poet. This is supported in the line; “dance with this pencil” where the son’s hand, similar to his father’s, dances. The difference between the hands however is that the father’s hands are described as dancing when performing operations since he is a surgeon, while the son’s hands dance when writing poems. We can already here assume that the persona is the poet himself, mainly because of some clear indications e.g. ‘my father’ and also since Stallworthy obviously is also a poet.                                                                                                                                    

Join now!

          In this poem the son compares his hand with his father’s. The first line itself tells us that the persona’s father is a person with a job that involves a lot of research and studying. In the next two lines we come to learn that the father is a surgeon by profession. The idea of the father being a surgeon is backed up further by the medical diction; ‘scalpel’, ‘stitch’ and ‘Lancet’. Lurking beneath the simple comparing of hands one can find an underlying description of the relationship between the father and the son and ...

This is a preview of the whole essay