EFFECTS- ALAN JENKINS

‘Effects’ The title is a somewhat informative choice because it has connotations of change,
development and impact. As such, a reader is likely to infer that there will be a transition of some
kind described in the poem, with particular attention to how the change has affected something or
someone. The pronunciation of ‘Effects’ may be interesting to a reader for the way in which it is a
relatively ‘drawn out’ word, due to the double ‘f’ and the ‘s’ to form a plural, which could be
interpreted and indicating the idea of lasting effects and impact.
Poem Structure
A reader’s initial impression when they first see the poem is potentially one of intimidation, or a
sense of being overwhelmed, as a result of the long single stanza which makes up the poem. As such,
a reader may interpret this as a representation of the huge range of ‘Effects’ that occur and need to
be considered, potentially coming to this viewpoint before even reading a single word from the
poem. Alternatively they may develop this viewpoint part way through the poem, which is likely to
be even more effective because it can be related directly to the descriptions in order to create more
empathy.
Various forms of punctuation are also used in the poem, with more variety than most in the Poems
of the Decade Anthology, with caesura in the form of commas and full stops along with hyphens,
brackets and inverted commas. This mix of punctuation may make a reader consider how it is
arguably more ‘story-like’ and descriptive than a typical poem, with lists of objects and a more
natural sense of speech and opinion communicated. This would be particularly noticeable for text in
inverted commas, as this indicates a different tone of voices, which would help to emphasise the
terms being used, even more so if the poem is read aloud. A similar effect would also be achieved
with the use of hyphens, with the extended pause also helping to place emphasis on the items such
as “the scotch”. Despite this range of punctuation, there are only two full stops, which would be very
effective at building on the existing ‘overwhelming’ feeling that a reader may have as a result of the
single stanza.
Some readers may also feel a sense of confusion from the poem due to the wide range of
descriptions, which would be further emphasised by the lack of consistent rhyme scheme.  If a
rhyme pattern were to be used then this would have brought a more predictable rhythm and greater
sense of order to the poem, so the fact that the poem lacks one would encourage a reader to
consider the reasoning behind this. One interpretation could be that this perhaps represents a
confused mental state of the mother (inferred from the inclusion of “before I was born”), or
alternatively the confusion that can come with grief. It is also important to notice how the rhyme
scheme does become more consistent towards the end of the poem, which can be interpreted as
showing the greater sense of clarity which the narrator is achieving.
Poetic Techniques
Repetition plays an important role in adding extra emphasis to specific descriptions and aspects in
‘Effects’ – in particular the way in which diacope is used (when repetition of a word is broken by
another word), for example, “drink after drink” and “night after night”. This is a very effective use of
repetition because some readers are likely to feel a sense of hopelessness or despondence,
particularly as both “night” and “drink” can have negative connotations. As such, a reader is likely to
have a much more emotional connection with the poem, making it more memorable and effective.
Similarly, adjectives and verbs play an important role in the poem so as to further emphasise the
descriptive and story-like nature of the poem. The added description and imagery which these
provide, such as “cheap cut” or “faded snapshots” not only improve the ability of a reader to
accurately imagine and picture the situation, but it also adds subtle extensions of understanding due
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to the connotations of these words; in particular with these examples the indication that the family
was not overly well off when growing up and faced various struggles, evoking more sympathy.
Also of note is the use of first person descriptions throughout the poem so as to build a more
personal connection. Some readers may not see this as initially important, but when it is considered
how different the tone of the poem would be and the corresponding reader response if it was
written in the third person, it can be realised how important it is. It also makes the ending of the
poem much more emotional because a reader is able to apply the sense of loss to a specific
individual, rather than a more abstract group or entity.
Important Lines
“I held her hand, that was always scarred”
The alliteration of the ‘h’ sound in the opening of this sentence would be quite effective as it is at
the very beginning of the poem, perhaps being interpreted as demonstrating a strong feeling of
emotion. The idea of something being “always scarred” is also emotive, and while it is given a
greater sense of normality on the next line by being linked to work in the kitchen preparing meals, it
still would show the sense of sacrifice which the mother has made in order to help provide for
others.
“the scotch // That, when he was alive, she wouldn’t touch”
The inclusion of alcohol would be effective due to its various significant connotations, particularly
through how it is seen as being ‘off limits’ when her husband was alive. This emphasises the sense of
loss and the negative ways in which a death can impact an individual, perhaps indicating a similar
reaction for the narrator by the end of the poem. It is also interesting to consider the use of “touch”
because this action shows a very personal connection, a clear reminder of the distinctly human
aspect of this poem.
“The last words she had said were Please don’t leave“
An already simple yet highly effective line is made even more important due to the italicised text so
as to place additional audible and visual emphasis on the plea of the mother. This is likely to be very
effective for a reader because it is a natural desire that could easily be related to, but then mixed
with the inevitable demands of everyday life, showing the hard decisions people regularly have to
make.
‘Effects’ Key Themes
Family: ‘Effects’ closely relates to family through the way it directly explores the current relationship
between an ill mother and their child, with the inclusion of references to the mother’s husband. It
could be very emotional for readers who may have had similar experiences, enabling them to
strongly emphasise with the descriptions.
Childhood: Similarly, there are numerous references to childhood experiences of the narrator while
with his parents (specifically his mother) and the way that they are reminiscing now helps to
demonstrate to a reader the long lasting impact of an upbringing.
Identity: The theme of identity is present throughout ‘Effects’ although arguably relates most
strongly to the title, through which the mother’s identity is summarised through the physical and
emotional impact that she has had on others.

Effects by Alan Jenkins is a stream of consciousness induced poem, made up of only two

sentences in one long stanza. We can view the poem as both an unravelling of the narrator’s
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thoughts, or as the unravelling of his mother’s disease. Or, maybe it is the narrator filling
‘the little bag of effects’ with each line that comes.
So, we cannot talk about this stanza by stanza as there is only one, long stanza. So we will go
in depth and do it line by line (unless the line is unimportant or trivial). The first thing to
note is the lack of figurative language in the poem, which some may think it will be,
therefore, difficult to analyse. But if anything, it makes it interesting to see why Jenkins did
this, and what ‘effect’ it has.
The poem begins with the declarative sentence ‘I held her hand’ – the alliteration of the
letter ‘h’ represents the connection that the narrator has with ‘her’, and we will find that
this is anaphorically referenced later in the poem. The narrator continues to speak of ‘her’
and all of ‘her’ physical qualities:
‘hand, that was always scarred / From chopping, slicing, from the knives that lay in wait…/
The knuckles reddened, rough from scrubbing hard / At saucepan, frying pan, cup and
plate’.

The domesticity that has been represented in these lines such as ‘chopping, slicing…knives’
and ‘saucepan’, which represents the stereotype of women doing the cooking and cleaning
in the household. Also, the way that Jenkins did not say ‘the’ saucepan, ‘the’ frying pan, for
instance, but he said ‘At saucepan’ personifies these inanimate objects and this has created
an image that the ‘her’ that the narrator is speaking of has made friends with domesticity as
though it was a person. This personification is an exception to the lack of figurative language
generalisation.
The narrator goes onto say that ‘she’ gives her love in ‘the only way she knew / In each
cheap cut of meat’. Jenkins has used assonance of the ‘ea’ sound to represent, like the
alliteration used earlier, the connection between himself and ‘her’. The next line says
‘Old-fashioned food she cooked and we ate;’.

The way that the narrator says that ‘she’ cooked ‘old-fashioned’ food represents that there
is a generational gap in the relationship. The woman is obviously seen as quaint to the
narrator, and there is a subsequent image of superiority through saying ‘she cooked and we
ate’ as though her cooking pushed them the narrator into eating it. This represents that the
narrator felt forced and obliged to the superior woman. We are beginning to get the
sensation that ‘she’ is the narrator’s mother, or a woman in the former generation in his
family.

Now, the possessive pronoun ‘they’ is used, and at this point we do not know who ‘they’
are. But, ‘they had taken off her rings, / The rings she’d kept once in her dressing-table
drawer’. The symbolism of her ‘rings’ implies that she was married, or engaged, which
reinforces the idea that she could be the narrator’s mother and / or he has observed her
relationship with a man. The use of the past tense ‘she’d’ implies that she no longer keeps
the rings in the dressing-table, but more likely that she no longer has the dressing-table for
them to be kept in. The dressing-table is further described:
‘With faded snapshots, long-forgotten things / (Scent-sprays, tortoise-shell combs, a snap or
two / From the time we took a holiday ‘abroad’)’.

The semantic field of memories and the past creates one of the ‘effects’ that the poem is
about. To the narrator, it is difficult to deduce whether he is feeling upset or cynical about
EFFECTS- ALAN JENKINS
his past, with the verbs ‘faded’ and ‘long-forgotten’ having an ambiguous tone. Jenkins may
have been suggesting that the relationship between the narrator and ‘she’ has ‘faded’ since
their ‘holiday’, and is also ‘long-forgotten’. However, this contradicts all of the preceding
description as the narrator was clearly thinking about her, therefore it is not ‘long-
forgotten’.
The narrator goes onto say that ‘she’ had never been without her rings lately, because ‘[s]he
wanted everyone to know she was his wife’. This creates the relationship between ‘she’ and
the mystery man, but now we have enough information to say that these people are the
narrator’s parents. So, for the beginning of her relationship with her husband, she had not
worn the rings, but ‘lately’ – implying that it is the latter part of their relationship – she has
become more connected with being a wife. Why do you think that is? Is it because a
disruption in their relationship forcing her to believe in their love more? But, as we carry on
we find out

‘Only now that he was dead.’

So, the disruption in their relationship was his death, implying that the mother did not want
to become available to the outside world as a single woman, and wanted people to know
that in spirit she was a wife. It is important to note, in terms of structural analysis, that the
quotation above concludes the first sentence of the poem. The full stop is a caesura, which
creates a fragmented rhythm and general atmosphere about the poem, which implies that
the relationship is now fragmented due to the father’s death. This is evidently a pivotal
event that happened in their lives, and the caesura, and full stop, may have been used to
represent how significant his death was.
Now the narrator says that his mother’s watch is gone, as well as her rings, and the watch
was something that the narrator had ‘never known he not have that on,’ which proves that
it was ‘they’ who took it off. Then he says
‘in all the years they sat together / Watching soaps and games shows I’d disdain / And not
when my turn came to cook for her,’

The realism that Jenkins has used, as opposed to figurative language, of ‘soaps and game
shows’ represents that the narrator’s parents’ relationship had been one of realism and
comfort, and connected to every day issues. Then, the ‘disdain’ that the narrator felt when
he had to cook for his mother ‘English, bland, / Familiar flavours’, he felt her unworthy of his
love. The way that Jenkins has used the attributive adjective ‘bland’ to describe what food
the mother likes can also mask itself in describing the relationship between mother and son.
The narrator appears to be mocking his mother as he says, in inverted commas, that his
mother did not like ”funny foreign stuff”. The alliteration of the letter ‘f’, which is also seen
in the ‘familiar flavours’ mentioned in the paragraph above, should represent their
connected relationship, but the satire that is built into the inverted commas implies
otherwise.
The ‘funny foreign stuff’ is, apparently, something that ‘Young people seemed to eat these
days’. This contradicts the idea that the narrator is youthful, because he is talking of ‘young
people’ as a separate body of people to himself. In addition, this also juxtaposes the way
that ‘young people’ generally have blander taste buds than older people, so this portrays
the idea that young people are actually more advanced than older generations.
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The narrator’s mother is again sitting in front of the television now, in the poem, but she is
alone, implying that the grieving stages of her husband’s death are being described. In the
following lines, Jenkins has used diacopes to represent the tiresome and dreary atmosphere
that now swamps the television room. For instance, ‘Night after night’ and ‘Drink after
drink’. The abstract noun ‘night’ has negative connotations, and represents darkness, so the
darkness that she must be feeling because her husband died is multiplied with the use of
the diacope. The subsequent use of ‘drink’ could be seen as both a verb and a noun. If it
were a verb, she would be ‘drinking and drinking’, but if it were a noun, there is no
implication that she was ‘drinking’ at all, but there are just ‘drinks’.
Despite the minimal hope that the ‘drink’ was not for the narrator’s mother, Jenkins
uses dynamic verbs to represent that they were for her. For example ‘heaved’; ‘blinked’;
‘poured’; ‘gulped’; and ‘stared’. The use of dynamic verbs implies that she is becoming
unmotivated to do anything but drink, as all of these verbs have a connection to alcohol.
However, the narrator then says
‘the scotch / That, when he was alive, she wouldn’t touch, / That was her way to be with
him again;’.

The idea that she would not ‘touch’ alcohol before her husband died implies that the
‘pouring’ and ‘gulping’ was simply a coping mechanism. But evidently, her husband did drink
the scotch when he was alive, so when it says that is was ‘her way to be with him again’
illustrates that if she drinks, she will be closer to “being” him.

There is now a pivotal temporal deixis:

‘Not later in the psychiatric ward,’.

The use of the adverb ‘later’ relates to the time that the narrator’s mother was put in a
psychiatric ward. But, the use of ‘not’ suggests that it is ‘not’ later, or it is ‘not’ a psychiatric
ward. The former is more plausible, however, as it could be saying that since the narrator’s
father died, his mother had been in an emotional ‘psychiatric ward’, even before she was in
a physical one. And his mother ‘blinked unseeing at the wall’, as though she is completely
oblivious, “now”, to the world around her, in specific the ‘wall’ next to, or opposite her.

The narrator’s mother is dreaming of when she was a little girl, and the narrator thinks
about it concurrently, and he says ‘before / I was born, or grew up and learned contempt,’
as though her life before him was a ‘dream’, but when he ‘grew up’ her life became
‘contempt’.

Jenkins uses syndetic listing to represent the madness that is connoted through the
psychiatric ward, and subsequently the madness now in the narrator’s mother:
”pour soul’s’ moans and curses /…pills and blinked and stared / …round, and drooled, and
swore…’.

This stream of consciousness idea that is seen through the syndetic listing creates the
psychotic atmosphere that the mother is in. The terms mentioned above all have very
negative connotations, and illustrate the psychotic brain.
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We then see the idea that the narrator’s mother’s name is ‘smudged black ink’ on her
rubber band, as though she is slowly disintegrating into death alongside her husband. The
verb ‘smudged’ shows that she is fading and her life is becoming more fuzzy. Then, the
narrator uses the anaphoric reference mentioned at the beginning of this post:

‘On the hand I held’.

This time, the declarative sentence has less alliteration, which represents the connection
between mother and son is becoming less due to the mother’s psychiatric status. This is
reinforced by the following statement which says ‘Whose fingers couldn’t clasp mine any
more’. Their relationship is becoming less connected and un-‘clasped’, representing the
mother’s descent out of humanity.

The last words that the narrator’s mother says is ‘Please don’t leave‘, which represents how
good their relationship was, despite all of the mess that is represented in the stream of
consciousness, this lasting imperative sentence is all that will be remembered of their
relationship by his mother. However, to juxtapose this, the narrator says ‘But of course I left’
but his mother would not know that he left, so their relationship was wholesome in her
eyes, but not in his.
The final line of the poem explains all of the losses and gains, and madness and satire:

‘A nurse bring the little bag of her effects to me.’

The ‘they’ earlier in the poem who took his mother’s rings and watch is now revealed,
perceptively, to be the nurse. We could argue that this poem, the entire stream of
consciousness, lists, and insane waves of phonological features without figurative language,
is the ‘little bag of her effects’, and it concludes the story of a mother-son relationship at its
most chaotic, but also at its most simple.
Themes:
 Death.  Relationship
s.
 Feelings.
 Generations.
 Lack of connections.
 Love.
 Time.
 Madness.
STRUCTURE
 The first line of the poem “I held her hand” (she is dead), releases a flood of
memories, a vein/secret string of recollection that recreates the life which has just ended
 Syntax – The poem is only 2 sentences, showing the two influential lives that he has
lost and how it affects him greatly – it has an effect. they represent how life is a constant
and will carry on, all your memories are there and continue to take place, yet one day it
will all just come to an end, suddenly.
 “-it was gone” – this line is the TURNING POINT where the narrator starts to notice
that things are missing, it’s as if his father’s death has finally sunk in
 Irregular rhyme scheme (until the end) – Starts off as alternate line rhyme and then
ends in couplets – This shows how he is left in a state of uncertainty when his parents die,
it upsetting affects the way she is to live and love, work. As the poem goes on, he regains
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some of his ‘old self’ back and comes to terms with the deaths. The irregularity mirrors
the nature of the central relationship and the distance between him and his parents.
 The poem unfolds a complex structure of clauses and sub clauses. Each new detail
the narrator notices about his mother’s hand triggers further memories
LANGUAGE TECHNIQUES
 Colloquialism – “fumble at my sleeve”, this makes the poem more informal and
relatable to the readers and we imagine the narrator to be a bumbling, middle class,
middle aged man
 Symbolism – “To whatever ‘funny stuff’ Young people seemed to eat these days” –
There is a clear link between this poem and ‘Material’. The symbolism of the materials
shows the difference between the two generations. How things change with time and
how there can be a lack of understanding between them. This creates a distance but can
also make people learn about them
IMAGERY
 Memories recreate the life, past and present
 The life remembered through the hand is typical of the mother’s class and era. It is
conservative, limited in terms of education and experience,  life lived at a time when
foreign holidays were beyond the reach of ordinary people, food meant plain, English
dishes, and a woman’s place was in the home. By contrast, the narrator/son is educated,
and this has opened up a physical and emotional distance between him and his mother
that her death has now made painfully permanent
TONE
 The tone is solemn and modest as he discovers his mistakes about the treatment
towards his mother and father
CONCLUSION
 The final line “A nurse bring the little bag of effects to me.” – The word ‘little’
obviously suggests there’s not much, yet the emphasis by having this as this as the final
line implies that despite its small amount, it means a lot. And the full stop shows the
finality of the mother’s death.
 The rhyming couplet brings emphasis to the end and the words ‘see’ and ‘me’ imply
how he is finally able to see his parents in a completely different light now that they are
dead. Whereas before they may have conflicted with each other, they are now at peace
and so is he
‘The poem’s power lies partly in the narrator’s sense of regret for the judgmental attitude of
his younger self, impatient with the limitations of his parents and background. Too late, he
has come to understand that his antipathy towards her reflects a lack of compassion: it’s
only now she’s dead that he finally holds her hand when it can no longer provide any
comfort. The closing image of the small bag of effects is a touching indication of how little
she has to leave behind.’

Poems that would be good to link to this would be…

 Material – deals with a similar theme, the physical left behind – memories
 Genetics – similar theme
 Inheritance – similar theme