My Father Would Not Show Us — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
My Father Would Not Show Us
The poems
What you need to know
The speaker sees her father's body five days after his death, remembers her childhood, and reflects that he hid his dying from his family and turned his face away.
How de Kok's plain, exact details of the body and the coffin, memories of a louder childhood, and the repetition of he hid and he lay show grief and a father's withdrawal.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Which way do we face to talk to the dead?', 'My father's face / five days dead', 'is organised for me to see', 'the borrowed coffin gleams unnaturally', 'a louder, braver place', 'my father's wry smile, his half-turned face', 'My father would not show us how to die', 'He hid, he hid away', 'everything he hears is white', 'face to the wall, he lay'.
Form: seven stanzas of free verse after an epigraph, the present tense, short lines, and a refrain that changes from would not to could not in the last stanza.
Context: Ingrid de Kok (born 1951), a South African poet who grew up in a gold-mining town under apartheid (1948–1994), lived in Canada from 1977 to 1984 and published Familiar Ground in 1988; and the epigraph from the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926).
Compares well with: A Child to his Sick Grandfather (an older relative's illness and death), Nettles (fathers and children), One Flesh (a child observing parents) and La Belle Dame Sans Merci (loss and death).
