Mother, any distance

Mother, any distance by Simon Armitage shows a young man measuring his new house with his mother's help. She holds the end of the tape measure while he climbs through the house. It becomes a metaphor for him growing up and moving away, while she still holds on.

Armitage published it in 1993, in a sequence of sonnets about his life. He later became Poet Laureate.

It is a loose sonnet, the traditional form of a love poem, here used for love between a mother and son. It has fifteen lines, not fourteen, as if he is stretching beyond the form, just as he is stretching away from her.

The three stanzas get longer, with longer lines, as the tape stretches further. The last line is short and stands alone: ‘to fall or fly’.

He opens by saying any distance over an arm's span ‘requires a second pair of hands’: he still needs his mother.

The tape measure connects them: ‘You at the zero-end, me with the spool of tape’. As he moves away, the line keeps ‘unreeling / years between us. Anchor. Kite.’ She is his steady anchor; he is a kite, free but tied.

‘I space-walk through the empty bedrooms’, like an astronaut still tied to his ship. At the end, he reaches towards an open hatch and a sky, ready ‘to fall or fly’: independence is exciting and risky.

Themes: family; growing up and independence; a parent's love; distance.

Compares well with:

• Walking Away: the same moment of separation, from the parent's side.
• Before You Were Mine: a child's view of their mother.
• Follower: a child growing up and away from a parent.