On her blindness

• Themes

  • Disability
  • Suffering
  • Loss
  • Pain
  • Suffering
• Context

  • Reference to 'On His Blindness' by 17th century poet John Milton where he considers his own life, health and struggles
• Structure

  • Two lines per stanza (with the exception of the final stanza) is unusual because it visually breaks the poem up and makes it more challenging to read at a normal pace.
  • Makes it feel like a natural conversation with frequent switching, creating a more personal tone. This makes the transition in subject matter at the end of the poem even more emotional for a reader.
  • In addition, the final line in its own stanza shows a break to this ‘combined’ and ‘conversation’ style of writing, making the death even more poignant.
• Poetic techniques

  • The decision to include speech within the poem helps to further emphasise the personal and conversational tone which is mimicked through the structure
  • Use of bathos - making something serious humorous
  • Imagery and descriptions throughout the poem help to highlight the presence of the imagination while also showing the difficulties faced by an individual without the sense of sight.
• "One should hide the fact that catastrophic handicaps are hell"


  • Poet does not use any euphemism to describe disability
  • Combats the ideas that people with disabilities are supposed to be brave but are also not supposed to talk about their disabilities
  • Breaks the taboo of disabilities
• "'I'd bump myself off.' I don't recall what I replied, but it must have been the usual sop, inadequate: the locked-in son"


  • Colloquial euphemism for killing herself - difficult for anyone to know how to respond, let alone her own son
  • Doesn't matter he can't remember what he said - anything would be inadequate
  • 'Locked-in' is ironic as his mother is actually locked-in in her disability
• "..so we'd forget, at times, that the long, slow slide had finished as blank as a stone."


  • Change in tone from the lyrical segment back to the conversational through the use of a caesura
  • 'slow slide' - sibilance - lyrical - metaphor for the mothers life and how her disability is killing her slowly
  • 'as blank as a stone.' - simile - conveys lifelessness and the weight of grief
• "Golden weather, of course, the autumn trees around the hospital ablaze with colour, the ground royal with leaf fall"


  • First instance of visual imagery
  • Idea of autumn is a metaphor for the end of his mothers life - autumn brings death, but beautifully
  • 'Leaf-fall' shows the pace quickening as she approaches death