Mother Any Distance...

The image of the mother just able to keep hold of the end of the tape measure kite string with a “pinch” shows that the son is aware of how she must be feeling, too. The limits of connection are being measures as well as the dimensions of a house. Armitage’s use of ellipsis is very clever in line 13 because it suggests the stretching even of this “last one-hundredth of an inch” The punctuation also suggests a decision being finally made that will result in having to “fall” like an anchor or “fly” like a kite. He must either remain dependent or become independent.

The precise though mundane details that Armitage chooses to focus upon in this poem help to remind us that it is the ordinary day to day shared activities that are the repositories of love. This love is unspoken on a day-to-day basis but this poem draws attention to that very fact by being emotionally understated. Armitage is extremely subtle in his choice of form, too. He employs the framework of a sonnet but does not elect to follow a standard rhyme scheme. The poem is organised into two quatrains and a sestet with a tailpiece, rather after the fashion of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s curtal (literally “cut-tailed” of curtailed) sonnet, “Pied Beauty”. In that poem, Hopkins chooses to write ten and a half lines, maintaining the proportions of the Italian sonnet. Here, Armitage gives us a poem that is recognisable as a sonnet but does not draw attention to itself in an ostentatious of way. This is in keeping with unemotional the tone of the poem, which leaves the reader to infer that the son has strong feelings of love and attachment to his mother. The fact that love was a traditional theme for the sonnet is also something that alerts us to the nature of the son’s feeling.