My Mother's Hands Poem Analysis

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish’s poem, My Mother’s Hands, is an emotional piece about the range of memories and feelings one has when a loved one dies. Mish uses an open form with four unrhymed stanzas, containing two octaves, a couplet, and a single line stanza. The poem is written from the author’s point of view, talking about her own mother. Mish uses both colorful and grim imagery along with repetition and figurative language to make the reader feel the grief she is feeling as she is looking upon her mother. On the surface, this poem is about the author grieving over her dead mother while observing the changes to her corpse, but it goes much deeper emphasizing the importance of life and how one is remembered goes beyond the aesthetics. The

The first stanza introduces the reader to the speaker inspecting her mother as she lies in her casket. Mish effectively uses repetition starting with “it” at the beginning of every thought to show her grief is consuming her and how her mother is the only thing she can think about. Mish also utilizes the word “closed” multiple times which reinforces the idea of death to the reader. This introduces a sad tone to the reader that continues throughout the rest of the poem by painting the picture of a deceased loved one at a funeral . Mish continues to use imagery to add to the sorrowful tone. This is seen in the line, “the suddenly apparent age lines in her neck” (line 6). This only adds to the sadness that the speaker is feeling and the fact that the age lines are “suddenly apparent” suggests the reader did not realize her mother aging and death caught her off guard, adding to the sorrow tone and highlighting the idyllic way the author viewed her mother when alive. This stanza ultimately sets up the rest of the poem as Mish starts to notice the imperfections and signs of age on her mother. The speaker is transfixed with her mother and the changes that have occurred to her body, especially as they compare to the way in which she saw her mother in