An essay comparing the presentation of death in the two poems from the Poems of the Decade anthology: Jenkin's Effects and Thorpe's 'On Her Blindness'. Written by a current university student that achieved an A* in English Literature A level by memorising these essays which are structured in an eas...
Essay Plan: Compare the ways in which issues relating to life and death are presented in
‘Effects’ and one other poem.
Introduction:
Two poems which explore issues of life and death are Alan Jenkins’ ‘Effects’ and Adam
Thorpe’s ‘On Her Blindness,’ which interestingly can be connected because they both
present sons reflecting on the lives lead by their mothers and ultimately, their mothers’
deaths.
Point 1:
In the opening section of ‘Effects,’ the speaker holding his late mother’s “scarred”
hand evokes in him memories of his mother’s rather difficult life.
Jenkins uses the active verbs “washing up,” “scrubbing” and “chopping, slicing” in
succession to describe how the speaker’s mother endured the scars on her hands
through carrying out domestic chores.
The speaker then suggests her reason for doing so was to give “love the only way she
knew,” recalling his mother’s caring yet non-communicative nature, as her feelings
of love and affection for her family only manifested in her actions.
Point 2:
Likewise, the opening section of ‘On Her Blindness’ focuses on a son retrospectively
thinking about the difficulties of his blind mother’s life, and the possibly surprising
and disturbing way she communicated about it.
From the outset, Thorpe challenges the stereotypical face of adversity, as instead of
bravely baring her condition “like a Roman” like the media typically portrays the
disabled, his mother breaks social taboos by casually talking about her blindness in a
brutally honest way.
This is evident in the colloquial language Thorpe uses to quote his mother candidly
stating “I’d bump myself off” if she were to give up hope of a cure. This recreates his
mother’s sense of desperation and contempt for her condition, which is usually
stigmatised for the disabled to express.
Point 3:
Centrally, within ‘Effects,’ we see that the son begins to focus on his own journey of
life in which his education and more progressive ideals distanced him from his
mother.
The generational gap is highlighted when his mother labels foreign food as “funny
foreign stuff,” and the speaker confesses his “disdain” for his mother’s television
preferences.
There was a rift in their relationship due to their different life experiences: the
speaker has had more varied experiences, whilst his mother has not experimented
as much and remained socially conservative.
Point 4:
The concept of journey through life is also present in ‘On Her Blindness,’ where the
son casts his mind back to his mother’s interactions with her grandchildren.
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