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Note on Mother (1904-73)

This is close to a true history.  In Part 2 of De Rerum Natura you have myth.¹ Does anyone do justice to this subject?  There are facts I don’t know, and perhaps if this is a tribute at all, it’s to how the poor lived in the thirties.  There were so many aunts, uncles and cousins that ours was almost an extended family; no one went without help.

Alan Marshfield

¹ My self-revelations are a mixture of the frank confessional, necessary mythologising and inadvertent disclosure.  On devices, for anyone interested: here I’ve used mostly consonantal assonance in the rhyming, dropping in a true rhyme here and there, and sometimes a common (vowel) assonance.  Occasionally I’ve achieved an ambition (some poets do it all the time): chiming unstressed with stressed syllables (table / swell) and getting away with almost sod all (pillows / lives, where just the ‘s’, the [z]-sound, carries the ‘rhyme’).  (back)

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