‘Effects’

By Alan Jenkins
About the author
Alan Jenkins was born in Surrey in 1955 and brought up in London, where he has lived most of his life. He studied at the
University of Sussex and has worked for the Times Literary Supplement since 1981, as poetry and fiction editor, then deputy
editor. He was also a poetry critic for The Observer and the Independent on Sunday from 1985–1990.
His poetry collections include In The Hot-House (Chatto & Windus, 1988); Greenheart (Chatto & Windus, 1990); Harm (Chatto
& Windus, 1994), which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year); The Drift (Chatto & Windus, 2000),
a Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and A Shorter Life (Chatto & Windus, 2005), which was
shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year). Drunken Boats, containing his acclaimed translation
of Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau ivre’, was published in 2007; the French symbolist poets were an early, major influence. He received an
Eric Gregory Award in 1981, a Cholmondeley Award in 2006, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Jenkins has said that one of his poetic ‘elders and betters’ once told him, ‘Your subject is loss. Stay with that’ – and the treatment
of loss appears as a significant theme throughout his work. In earlier collections the loss was focused on love, particularly in the
painful central sequence of his book Harm about the aftermath of a love affair. Later work has included many elegies for friends
and his parents. Known for their confessional tone, Jenkins’ poems are also formally brilliant, his scrupulous structures and sharp
wit helping to shape the intense emotions he lays bare.
Summary of the poem

This poem explores the relationship of a middle class son to his working class mother.
Her limited education and the conservative attitudes of her generation created a gulf
between them. He holds her hand now she is dead and this brings a flood of recollection.
the mother grieving for her husband, and the speaker grieving for his mother. The poem
focuses on their guilt, with both the mother and the son showing affection to their loved
ones only after their deaths.
The mood is sad, with understated regret for his failure to understand and make
allowances for the person she was and the era in which she lived. It is too late to rectify
his lack of compassion for her. The small bag of effects is a symbol of how little she had
to leave behind, but the huge impact that she has made on him.
Title analysis

The title is ambiguous, and could be a noun and a verb. Her personal ‘effects’ or property
affect the speaker. But, ‘to effect change’ means to initiate or enable change to take
place. His mother’s possessions — her death and the few things she leaves behind
continue to trigger this process.
‘I held her hand, that was always scarred from
chopping, slicing, from the knives that lay in wait’
The ambiguous opening sets the tone. The speaker begins by establishing the fact that
Her hands were scarred from working in the kitchen, but this could also symbolise the
scars she obtains from her devotion to her family, who may not recognise her sacrifice.
The ‘knives that lay in wait’ could be a metaphor for the hurts that children or adult
offspring may inflict on their parents.
Note the irregular rhyme scheme, with rhyming words that unify the poem, though
without a defined pattern. So ‘scarred’ rhymes with ‘hard’ in line four, and ‘wait’ rhymes
with ‘plate’ in line five.
‘In bowls of washing-up, that was raw, the knuckles reddened
rough from scrubbing hard at saucepan, frying pan, cup and
plate’
This   list of tasks indicates the hard work involved in bringing up children before the
asyndetic

days of labour-saving devices. The activities are all domestic and stereotypical of a
mother’s role in the kitchen.
Note the hard,   consonants in ‘reddened rough’ and ‘scrubbing’ and ‘knuckles’. The
alliterative

long sentence is   spilling over at the ends of the line, mimicking the seemingly never
enjambed

ending cycle of domestic tasks.

‘And giving love the way she knew, in each cheap cut of meat,
in roast and stew, old-fashioned food she cooked and we ate;’

His mother belongs to the generation of working class women who were frugal and had
to make meals from cheap ingredients. The recipes were traditional and, from the point
of view of the present generation, dull.
The irregular rhyme of ‘knew’ and ‘stew’ suggests a sense of union, suggesting that love
goes into the food she makes.
‘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 (scent-sprays, tortoise-shell combs, a snap or two’

She is defined by the few modest possessions that she kept in a specific place. They are
characterized by their sentimental value, important only to herself.
The mother’s manner of mourning parallels the speaker’s mourning at the end. When her
husband was alive her rings were kept in the ‘dressing-table drawer’, but she wore them
after he died because ‘She wanted everyone to know she was his wife’.
Similarly, the speaker neglects his mother during her lifetime and, only after her death
does he reminisce about her through the medium of the poem.
‘From the time we took a holiday “abroad”)’

The speaker’s mother had only a hazy idea of the countries she visited, so ‘abroad’ was a
word that defined any country that wasn’t England. Readers should be aware that most
people of her generation and class would have left school at the age of fourteen and had
only a rudimentary grasp of geography and other cultures.
‘But lately had never been without, as if she wanted everyone
to know she was his wife only now that he was dead’

By implication the reader can assume that the speaker’s mother was widowed and still
mourned her husband. Her status as ‘his wife’ was clearly important to her.
The bald statement ‘now that he was dead’ indicates that the speaker has a more
accepting attitude to his father’s death.
‘And her watch? -classic ladies’ model, gold strap - it was
gone, and I’d never known her not have that on, not in all the
years they sat together’
The watch defines her. It may have been her only valuable possession after years of
economy and providing meals with cheap cuts of meat. It also represents the time she
devoted to her family and was her form of love. Now she and her watch have gone.
The description, between the dashes, sounds rather like a sales pitch. The speaker may be
suppressing his own emotions by this factual approach.
‘Watching soaps and game shows I’d disdain’

The two brief words ‘I’d disdain’ is a confession of snobbery. Mother and son were apart
not only in generations but in attitudes and education. Does this confession imply
understated love and guilt?
‘And not when my turn came to cook for her, chops or chicken portions,
English, bland, familiar flavors she said she preferred to whatever “funny
foreign stuff” young people seemed to eat these days, she’d heard’

His mother appears to be too old to care for herself. That her son cooks for his mother
could imply that he is trying to return the love she gave her family. Naturally, it has to be
the plain, bland English food. The ‘funny foreign stuff’ introduces a note of humour. It is
also likely that the speaker is middle-aged, but to a woman of her age he will belong to
the category of ‘Young people’.
‘Not all the weeks I didn’t come,’

This is another guilt-loaded confession; a son who has failed to return his mother’s care.
‘When she sat night after night and stared unseeing at the television, at
her inner weather, heaved herself upright, blinked and poured drink
after drink, and gulped and stared - the scotch that, when he was alive,
she wouldn’t touch, that was her way to be with him again;’

The dry humour masks the tragedy of a lonely, bereaved woman yearning for her dead
husband. The term ‘inner weather’ implies changeable emotions, ebbs and flows of grief
and happy memories.
There is a rhythmic quality to this section. Note ‘Night after night’ is echoed by ‘Drink
after drink’. Also ‘blinked and poured’ is followed by ‘gulped and stared’.
‘Not later in the psychiatric ward, where she blinked unseeing at
the wall, and the nurses (who would steal anything she said), and
dreamt of when she was a girl, of the time before
The mental processes of the elderly mentally ill, otherwise known as psycho-geriatric
patients, are accurately described — when the past becomes vivid and the present
distorted. She clearly believes she is being robbed by the nurses, though her possessions
are returned to her son in the appropriate way.
‘I was born, or grew up and learned contempt,’
‘Contempt’ and ‘disdain’ are the only two references to the son’s attitude to his mother.
The self-criticism is clear, all the more effective because it is understated.
‘While the TV in the corner blared to drown some “poor soul’s”
moans and curse, and she took her pills and blinked and stared as
the other shuffled around, and drooled, and swore…
A characteristic of some elderly people is an inability to recognise their own aging, but
to see others as old. Hence, she regards the other resident as a ‘poor soul’. Symptoms
like these are accurately observed.
The rhythmic patterns are continued; here ‘moans and curses, 'blinked and stared’ and
‘drooled and swore’ emphasise the sad state of the residents.
‘But now she lay here, a thick rubber band with her
name on it smudged in black ink
The watch that is ‘missing’ is ironically replaced by the hospital identification band.
‘On the hand I held, a blotched and crinkled hand whose fingers
couldn’t clasp at mine anymore or falteringly wave, or fumble at my
sleeve - the last words she had said were please don’t leave’

The final paired adjectives describe her hand; ‘blotched and crinkled’. This returns the reader
to the opening of the poem. Here the word ‘hand’ is repeated to emphasise its importance.
Holding his mother’s hand is a proxy for love.
Note the use of the definite article when the speaker refers to the hand. This differs from the
beginning of the poem where he refers to “her hand”. In death, his mother ceases to be a
person, and is already a memory.
The plaintive line ‘Please don’t leave’ is poignant and forms a dramatic climax.
‘But of course I left; now I was back, though she could not know that,
or turn her face to see a nurse bring the little bag of her effects to me.’

The final rhyming triplet sums up the sense of regret. While she was alive he left her (‘of
course I left’), but his presence now she is dead is meaningless.
The significance of the bag of ‘effects’ comes clear. Her things represent her
individuality and her life. They also represent the emotions — the ‘effect’ — including
love, that his mother’s life and death had on him.