Mona Abulhassan

‘Two Hands’ Commentary

In the poem, ‘Two Hands’, the writer is comparing his hand with his father’s. He tries to show that, even though with the similarity of the hands physically, "spade palms, blunt fingers, short in the joint,” they are very different people. The ‘Two Hands’ in the title, represent the two different personalities of the father and the son (writer). The writer helps us to understand his relationship with his father and their feelings towards each other.

        Stallworthy viewed his father as a surgeon, who is very dedicated to his work. Although he does not mention the profession directly, there are medical words in the passage which help us to discover that by ourselves, those words are “scalpel”, “stitch”, and “Lancet”.

Join now!

The fact that the father is dedicated to his work was not necessarily a good thing, because he would spend all of his spare time doing it, and would then never spend any time with his family. This is shown by Stallworthy beginning this poem with the father holding a “pencil nodding stiffly in the hand”, and ending it with “The pencil drops”. By doing that, he gave us the impression that as long as his father is in the house, he is with a pencil and working, and it is only dropped when he wants to go out. This ...

This is a preview of the whole essay