Michael Woods writes about Mother Any Distance

A mother and child, presumably a son, measure up the new house he is moving in to with a measure tape. He unreels the tape as he moves up through the house and this becomes a metaphor for the measuring of time as well as distance.

This poem is a touching contemplation upon the relationship between mother and son. As he grows older, the persona in the poem becomes increasingly aware of the distance in both physical and temporal terms between him and his mother. However, he also has an acute sense of the unbreakable attachment between them that will remain even if they will be living in separate houses.

The poem opens with the word “Mother”, the object of the persona’s address. The tone is relaxed and conversational and Armitage concentrates on the human, intimate detail of the hand. His reliance on his mother as “second pair of hands” is clear. In this first quatrain the distances explored are human and domestic at first but line 4 introduces a very different scale through the metaphorical references to “acres of walls” and “prairies of the floors”. Fields in England are measured in acres and prairies are vast expanses of arable land in America. These details deftly introduce a sense of continental distance. The son’s house move is clearly not a physical emigration but in an emotional sense, it is because he is moving to the new country that is not his mother’s house. A person is small in relation to an acre and miniscule in relation to a prairie. These huge areas help to convey the sense of being in a big new place and of being in need of something to offer a means of making sense of the dimensions of things. The persona’s mother helps him to measure “windows, pelmets, doors” (line 3) and is also an “Anchor” for him even though there are “unreeling / years” (lines 7-8) separating them. She is the anchor and he is the kite. The extended metaphor of measurement is used to convey the literal business of measuring up a new house for curtains, and so on but when Armitage writes of “reporting back to base” we are led to think about a message that may well go back to a “mother ship” from an astronaut, something that is clearly intended since line 9 opens with “I space-walk through the empty bedrooms”. This both conjures an image of a little boy imagining he is in space (something the speaker may well have done) but also reminds us that to become an independent adult is a difficult and sometimes perilous business. The verbs at the ends of lines 5-7, “recording”, “leaving” and “unreeling” are neatly ambiguous because they describe both what connects mother and son but also draws attention to the distance between them as the son has moved to his own house.

Armitage links the second and third stanzas through the image of a kite and an astronaut. No matter how much string is unreeled, the person flying the kite has hold of the end of its string, there is a connection between it and the flyer. In the same way, an astronaut is linked by what is called an umbilicus to the space ship (often called the mother ship). Both these ideas are expressive of the speaker’s connection with his mother. Obviously, the umbilicus that once linked her to him has been physically severed but the bond of love remains. As he moves into unknown territory, climbing the “ladder to the loft, to breaking point” we are given a sense of the kite string or anchor chain about to break but the “breaking point” as this is the speaker’s house – he has almost broken away from his mother. Another possibility is that the phrase is used to describe the speaker’s emotional state. The fact that “something / has to give” reflects the truism that we all have to make a break in our own lives sooner or later that is independent from our parents. There is, of course, a line break after “has to give” which typographically reinforces the idea that a big step into a new life must be taken.

The distance between mother and son is physically only “two floors” but emotionally it could be limitless like “an endless sky” (line 14). The strain being put on the metaphorical kite string is indeed intense as conveyed in the fine conclusion to this poem:

“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.” (lines 12-15)

The image of the mother just able to keep hold of the end of the tape measure kite string with a “pinch” shows that the son is aware of how she must be feeling, too. The limits of connection are being measures as well as the dimensions of a house. Armitage’s use of ellipsis is very clever in line 13 because it suggests the stretching even of this “last one-hundredth of an inch” The punctuation also suggests a decision being finally made that will result in having to “fall” like an anchor or “fly” like a kite. He must either remain dependent or become independent.

The precise though mundane details that Armitage chooses to focus upon in this poem help to remind us that it is the ordinary day to day shared activities that are the repositories of love. This love is unspoken on a day-to-day basis but this poem draws attention to that very fact by being emotionally understated. Armitage is extremely subtle in his choice of form, too. He employs the framework of a sonnet but does not elect to follow a standard rhyme scheme. The poem is organised into two quatrains and a sestet with a tailpiece, rather after the fashion of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s curtal (literally “cut-tailed” of curtailed) sonnet, “Pied Beauty”. In that poem, Hopkins chooses to write ten and a half lines, maintaining the proportions of the Italian sonnet. Here, Armitage gives us a poem that is recognisable as a sonnet but does not draw attention to itself in an ostentatious of way. This is in keeping with unemotional the tone of the poem, which leaves the reader to infer that the son has strong feelings of love and attachment to his mother. The fact that love was a traditional theme for the sonnet is also something that alerts us to the nature of the son’s feeling.