Mother, any distance — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Mother, any distance
The poems
What you need to know
Mother, any distance by Simon Armitage: what it is about, its context, and how Armitage 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: 'Mother, any distance greater than a single span / requires a second pair of hands', 'the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors', 'You at the zero-end, me with the spool of tape', 'back to base', 'Anchor. Kite.', 'I space-walk through the empty bedrooms', 'to breaking point, where something / has to give', 'to fall or fly'.
Form: a loose sonnet of fifteen lines, and the tape measure as an extended metaphor for the bond between mother and son.
Context: a young man moving into his first home, and Armitage's Book of Matches.
Comparisons with Walking Away, Follower and Before You Were Mine.
