Effects notes
Effects by Alan Jenkins explores the relationship of a middle class son with
‘poetry should be the surprising and beautiful organisation of things that life has disorganised.’
‘knuckles reddened’ fortis, breaks melody
‘(scent sprays,..) her watch’ objects are not important for the mother, but hold senstivity to the son
the title is initially ambiguous, could be her personal effects, or objects that impact the speaker, or it could reference effect in its denotation ‘to effect change’
repetition of rings - they hold sentimental value
his workingclass mother he reflects on how her limited education and the outdated attitudes of a conservative generation created a divide between him and his mother and how he wishes that this was not the case as he holds her hand as after she has died and remembers all their shared memories this poem explores the speaker's inner monologue as he goes on a nostalgic trip down memory lane and I think that it could best be compared to poems like on her blindness genetics to my 9-year-old self or an easy passage because it has themes
of family aging society and identity and without much further Ado let's dive straight into the analysis the poem contains only two full stops showing the two lives that the speaker has lost his father and his mother and how greatly this has affected him they were after all the central points in his life our father and our mother are are childhood pillars if your family is complete they're the people that support you they're the people that raise you often they're the most critical people in your family rather
than for example a grandmother or a sister because they were there since the beginning and for the speaker this was very much the case and their loss represents the loss of not only childhood but of pillars of support they represent the loss of comfort of security as the speaker has to Embark onto exploring this world alone onto a New Journey essentially on a journey where you're all by yourself and there isn't like a wiser person that you can turn to to and ask whenever you need something there is a regular rhyme
scheme until the very end and it starts off as having alternate rhyme schemes showing how there is no certainty after his parents' death he was left to navigate the difficult World on his own and it is this that he reminisces on when he holds his mother's dying hand as she symbolizes a loss of the final bit of security that he had left the poem has a very complex structure of Clauses and subclauses as each new detail that the speaker notices about his mother's hand triggers further memories much like
pruce mlin if you're familiar with In Search of Lost Time where pruce goes to his grandmother's house and he tastes mlin which is like a little cake right and he bites into the cake and suddenly he remembers his childhood memories because the taste the smell the warmth the atmosphere of comfort this combination brings him back to his childhood and likewise for the speaker his mother's hand serves as that bridge between the present and the past so for the purpose of this video I split the poem into several sections that I wanted
to go over and analyze so they're not quite line by line stanza by stanza but let's get started I hold her hand that was always scarred from chopping slicing from the knives that lay in weight in bowls of washing up that was raw the knuckles rened rough from scrubbing hard at saucepan frying pan cup and plate and giving love the only way she knew in each cheap cut of meat in roast and stew oldfashioned food she cooked we ate and I saw that they had taken off her rings the Rings she kept once in her dressing
table drawer with faded snapshots long forgotten things sent sprays torto shell Combs a snap or two from the time we took a holiday abroad but lately had never been without as if she wanted everyone to know she was his wife only now that he was dead the alliteration of the H sound I held her hand in this opening line it demonstrates the very strong feeling that the speaker is overwhelmed with I held her hand H is a sound which you cannot make other than when you're exhaling it's h you you have to Exhale a little you have to breathe
out and it's almost like this sigh of grief of emotion as the speaker struggles to put into the words say lost so for now all he says is I held her hand I held her hand not I held her dying hand not I held her hand and then thought about this I held her hand he has to focus on the present otherwise he risks getting overwhelmed Med and this this alliteration of held her hand this is the only thing that he's currently focusing on his last final link to his mother before they take her away so he holds her hand and that is the central
focus of the poem this alliteration emphasizes this it brings attention to her hand it brings attention to one of the central symbols of the poem as a whole and the idea of her hand being scarred is also a motive because it links him back to the normality of his daily life of her cooking for him and of the sacrifices that she has made for him and how it all how it is all Stripped Away completely with her death and as well as that card I think it suggests that well because her hand discard from preparing food for them because this was
the only way that she could give love the only way she knew how to as he says it suggest that it it was very tough love and he's only now acknowledging and realizing just how much this woman has sacrificed for him and for her family just how much care she has put on so even when they didn't think that she cared of course she cared the test was in her hand it's a scar it's a LIF lasting LIF lasting wound that you cannot get rid of her hands proudly bear the marks of their love and the list goes on of the food that she has made at
sauce pan frying pan cup and plate all the items that made her hand rough and all the items that gave her scars it's revealed here that this list is it's almost never ending she did everything for them she did the washing up she did the cooking she really played the traditional role of the mother and this this harsh imagery of the red and Knuckles it shows how much he his mother did for them because she was a workingclass woman so she was used to working with her hands so I mean it's a reference very much to the theme of
female positions in society and the themes of gender which we have seen in other poems so I think it would be useful to make connections between this specific poem here and other connections that focus on gender because you could talk about the role of women and for example the double burden because his mother as a working class woman would have been very used to working her whole life with her hands and even with her children she carries that work ethic across she believes that the only way she can show love to them is not through
And her watch? example of sprawling punctuation of internal monologue
first end stop being on the word ‘dead’ foreshadowing future - effusive structure, of 2 sentences - elocutionary punctuation
‘I didn’t come,’ caesura and guilt, ‘unseeing’ disassociation from reality
how is the speaker mourning the loss? the mother’s state haunts the speaker, as he reflects on ‘ Of when she was a girl’ ‘ others shuffled round, and drooled, and swore…’ the ellipsis compounds grief from the poet.
where is the volta in the poem? from ‘But now she lay here’ as this is returning after reflection on the mother’s descent into illness
the ending is sorrowful, melancholy and bitter, with couplets, almost as if the speaker cannot come to the realisation of what has happened. It is of a begging nature, as the character in the poem has a lack of connection with reality.
speaking it's not through the flowery adjoints and sentences of the middle class and of the upper upper middle class it's through showing them physically what she has done it's through physically showing them her love through cooking through making through preparing through all this menial labor that she has been used to her entire life she would do it the pragmatic way and perhaps the only way that they could afford because how else can you show love other than through gestures through actions if your if your language of love
is Gift buying that language of love is potentially only possible in welfare families that can afford to spend all this time picking out gifts or selecting things or well paying money for the things they think that their family would love a lot of judgment in the stanza from the speaker it's perhaps resent M showing love the only way she knew how that she never really like said I love you directly that she never really gave them gifts but it's it's it's resentment as if this is a child speaking now rather than the adult
speaker who has of course realized how immens of a sacrifice his mother has given towards him so there's also resentment perhaps at himself because all this cooking all this cleaning all these old-fashioned foods and he says here they just ate and they just ate she cooked we ate there's a parallelism here it highlights how they were very passive and she was very active she was very involved in their life it seems that they were always at the center of their mother's life but she was never the center of theirs she would focus she
would give everything to her children however all they did was eat they never really tasted the food they never really appreciated it and they never really thanked her it's very often a thankless and low rewarding job and this is what the speaker is realizing now that even in their childhood as they felt resentment that maybe she couldn't spend time or show love in the more traditional ways that actually she was showing love the way that she could and she was really giving them everything that she could they didn't want to eat
this old-fashioned food but this oldfashioned food was the food that the only food that their mother knew how to make and it was the food that she grew up with she wanted to share her childhood she wanted to share the love and comfort that she felt from her own mother with them and they never really appreciated it to them again it was just something like you come home and there's dinner on the table or there's lunch on their table there's hot food and you take that for granted