Climbing My Grandfather — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Climbing My Grandfather
The poems
What you need to know
Climbing My Grandfather by Andrew Waterhouse: what it is about, its context, and how Waterhouse uses language, form and structure.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the cluster it compares well with, with similarities and differences.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I decide to do it free, without a rope or net', 'First, the old brogues, dusty and cracked', 'an earth-stained hand', 'the skin of his finger is smooth and thick / like warm ice', 'the glassy ridge of a scar', 'soft and white / at this altitude', 'the slow pulse of his good heart'.
Form: one long stanza of enjambed lines that mirrors the climb, and the extended metaphor of the grandfather as a mountain.
Context: a grandchild's admiration and memory, and what the grandfather's body reveals about his life.
Comparisons with Follower, Eden Rock and Before You Were Mine.
