Leaving Certificate Ordinary Level – Excellence in English Language and Literature
Questions for discussion:
1. Is washing dishes or clearing up after dinner a task most of us have experienced? Does discussing such a routine event help us to relate to the poem?
2. In the fourth and fi fth lines, the poet says that she and her sister did not want to ‘end up’ like their mother, ‘after every meal stuck with red knuckles’. How do the daughters view their mother’s life?
3. The mother is described as having ‘red knuckles’. Is this a glamorous or attractive image? What does it indicate?
4. The mother washes the dishes with a ‘bleached rag’. Why is the cloth bleached? Is the word ‘rag’ a negative way to describe the washing-up cloth?
5. Look at the language used to describe the washing-up: the plates are ‘gummy’, the water is ‘greasy’ and full of ‘sloughed peas’ and ‘globs of egg and gravy’. Did you notice the repeated harsh ‘g’ sounds and the repetition of ‘s’ sounds? What is the effect of this? How do these descriptions make you feel?
6. This poem is in the form of a sonnet (eight lines and six lines). In sonnets, the fi rst eight lines (octet) usually pose a question and the last six lines (sestet) answer it. Is that the case in this poem? Look closely at the difference in description between the fi rst and second stanza.
