Commentary on the Poem ‘My Grandmother’ by Elizabeth Jennings Essay Example

distortion comes up in line four where the grandmother, “watched her own reflection in the brass salvers and silver bowls, there was no need of love. ” The poet creates a setting of grand surroundings, and extravagant objects, which were once new and belonged to someone.

The grandmother in a way fades in with the objects, becomes a part of them, so that she is herself like an antique object.The absence of love and the unavailability of it, as the grandmother devoted her whole life to the shop, create a rather desolate atmosphere and a sorrowful tone. We get no background on the grandmothers’ life, so we do not know what was her life like back when she was young, however we can presume that she had love, as she has a granddaughter. This part of her life remains unknown to the reader, and I think that this makes the poem more interesting as we can only uess, why did the grandmother ended up all alone at the end of her life, and why does she have an antique shop as her only and sole friend. The second stanza describes the poets’ refusal to go to the shop with her grandmother, “ And I remember how I once refused to go out with her, since I was afraid. It was perhaps a wish not to be used Like antique objects.

” The poet makes retrospection in this line, as I think that being only a child, one cannot think of such an explanation of her acts. The poet remembers her fear, and only later in her life thinks for an explanation to her distress.In this

verse we can find out that the grandmother was a closed person, and would keep her emotions and thoughts to herself, as the poet writes, “ Though she never said that she was hurt, I still could feel…” The guilt that the poet feels is a recurring theme in the poem, and I think the one for which reason the poet wrote it. She feels that she did something wrong that really hurt her grandmother, and her conscience haunts her until the present days.

In the third stanza, the poet continues to describe the relationship between her grandmother and the shop, which she was, “ too frail to keep. The description of the place where her grandmother stored her “best things,” brings out the typical style of Elizabeth Jennings’s style. She uses the sense of smell to describe the emptiness of her grandmothers’ life, “ The smell of absences where shadows come That can’t be polished,” and once again uses the “polish,” which replaces her grandmothers’ loneliness and absence of love. In the last stanza, the grandmother dies and the poet says that she “felt no grief at all.

” This once again shows that the poet was not attached to her grandmother, and probably there was no love between them.The guilt however still remains in the poets conscience, and I think that by going into the room with all the antique objects, she tries to find out anything about her grandmother, as she devoted her life to the objects, “things she never used But needed,” however the poet does not find anything, and she has no memories of her grandmother except for the antique

objects that are so polished, they have no finger marks- “ and no finger marks were there Only the new dust falling through the air. This last line of the poem and particularly the word “new” emphasizes once again the repetitiveness of life, how the old becomes new again, and how the grandmother went away from life as though she never existed. The poet feels that the unsaid is all that is left of her grandmother, however she does not say that she want to turn back the time and change the relationship with her grandmother.The simple fact that in the poem, she does not refer to her grandmother as granny or any other colloquial name for her shows that she had a hard relation with her grandmother, o would say that she had no relationship with her at all. The poet was scared as a child to end up alone like her grandmother, and spending time with her in the shop scared her.

Her only memory with her grandmother is linked to the antique shop, which makes this poem miserable and fills it with emotion.