Revise Armitage’s PoemsLooking at:

• common themes (the ideas he writes about)• language• form (the shape and lay out of the poem)

Duffy

HavishamAnne HathawayBefore You Were MineEducation for Leisure

Armitage

Mother, any distanceHomecomingKidHitcher

Pre-1914 poems

On My First SonneSonnet 130My Last DuchessThe Laboratory

Themes in Armitage’s Poems

Hitcher

I’d been tired, under

the weather, but the ansaphone kept screaming:

One more sick-note, mister, and you’re finished, Fired.

I thumbed a lift to where the car was parked.

A Vauxhall Astra. It was hired.

I picked him up in Leeds.

He was following the sun from west to east

with just a toothbrush and the good earth for a bed. The truth,

he said was blowing in the wind,

or round the next bend.

I let him have it

on the top road out of Harrogate – once

with the head, then six times with the krooklock

in the face – and didn’t even swerve.

I dropped into third

and leant across

to let him out, and saw him in the mirror

bouncing off the kerb, the disappearing down the verge.

We were the same age, give or take a week.

He’d said he liked the breeze

to run its fingers

through his hair. It was twelve noon.

The outlook for the day was moderate to fair.

Stitch that, I remember thinking,

you can walk from there.

Themes

Language

Form

Mother, any distance…

Mother, any distance greater than a single span

requires a second pair of hands.

You come to help me measure windows, pelmets, doors,

the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors.

You at the zero-end, me with the spool of tape, recording

length, reporting metres, centimetres back to base, then leaving

up the stairs, the line still feeding out, unreeling

years between us. Anchor. Kite.

I space-walk through the empty bedrooms, climb

the ladder to the loft, to breaking point, where something

has to give;

two floors below your fingertips still pinch

the last one-hundredth of an inch… I reach

towards a hatch that opens on an endless sky

to fall or fly.

Language

Homecoming

HomecomingThink, two things on their own and both at onceThe first, that exercise in trust, where those in frontstand with their arms spread wide and free-fallbackwards, blind, and those behind take all the weight.

The second, one canary-yellow cotton jacketon a cloakroom floor, uncoupled from its hook, becoming scuffed and blackened underfoot. Back homethe very model of a model of a mother, yours, putstwo and two together, makes a proper fist of itand points the finger. Temper, temper. Questionsin the house. You seeing red. Blue murder. Bed

Then midnight when you slip the latch and sneakno further that the call-box at the corner of the street;I’m waiting by the phone, although it doesn’t ringbecause it’s sixteen years or so before we’ll meet.Retrace that walk towards the garden gate; in silhouettea father figure waits there, wants to set things straight.

Themes

Language

Kid

KidBatman, big shot, when you gave the orderto grow up, then let me loose to wanderleeward, freely through the wild blue yonderas you liked to say, or ditched me, rather, in the gutter … well, I turned the corner.Now I’ve scotched that ‘he was like a fatherto me’ rumour, sacked it, blown the coveron that ‘he was like an elder brother’story, let the cat out on that caperwith the married woman, how you took herdowntown on expenses in the motor.Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg-shocker!Holy roll-me-over-in-a-clover, I’m not playing ball boy any longer

Batman, now I’ve doffed that off-the-shoulderSherwood-Forest-green and scarlet numberfor a pair of jeans and crew neck jumper;now I’m taller, harder, stronger, older.Batman, it makes a marvellous picture:you without a shadow, stewing overchicken giblets in the pressure cooker, next to nothing in the walk-in-larder,punching the palm of your hand all winter, you baby, now I’m the real boy wonder.

Themes

Language

Poem content theme form & point of view

Mother, any distance

A mother helps a son to measure up his new home. The son wants and fears freedom.

• parents and children• love / emotional ties

• 1st person perspective• autobiographical• irregular stanza form

My father thought A son faces his father’s scorn when he returns home with a pierced ear.

• parents and children• love / emotional ties

• 1st person perspective• autobiographical• irregular stanza form

Homecoming A lover reflects on an argument that his partner had in her childhood.

• parents and children• love / emotional ties

• 1st person perspective• irregular stanza form

November John takes his grandmother to an old people’s home and reflects on mortality.

• love / emotional ties• passage of time• death

• 1st person perspective• dramatic monologue• irregular stanza form

Kid Robin, Batman’s sidekick, has grown up, while Batman has grown old.

• character study• passage of time• resentment

• 1st person perspective• dramatic monologue• irregular stanza form

Those Bastards A reflection on social inequality from the point of view of a rebel.

• outsider• reflections on society

• persona / 1st person perspective• sonnet

I’ve made out a will The speaker leaves most of his body to medical science, but not his heart.

• death• love

• 1st person perspective• sonnet

Hitcher A tired and frustrated motorist murders a free-spirited hitch-hiker.

• outsider• resentment• murder / death

• persona / 1st person perspective• sonnet