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Material - Ros Barber - Coggle Diagram
Material - Ros Barber
Tradition, nostalgia, loss
A sense of nostalgia is initially perpetuated by allusions to the second-world war (post-war imagery), hankies were 'things for waving out of trains and mopping the corners of your grief'
'Hankies were presents from distant aunts' - Creates a sense of reliability and tradition. 'The naffest Christmas gift you'd get,' another colloquialism that perpetuates a sense of tradition and a kind of comical monotony, foreshadows the speaker's appreciation for the hanky later on?
'It was hankie that closed department stores,' the removal of an 'A' beforehand almost personifies the hanky.
A reference to department stores also serves as a foreshadowing and contrast to shopping malls or centres which are a more modern concept
'Dodgy foot,' reference to community. Lack of connection in modern-day society. Online shopping is impersonal and modern society is obsessed with convenience
'Mrs White,' continued reference to names creates a sense of community
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Modernity, mass production and dehumanisation
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Structure: 9 stanzas
Imperfect, uneven, incomplete
Grouped as 3s, trimester symbolism, maternity and motherhood
Iamic tetrameter is mostly consistent, with half-rhyme towards the end. Initially, ABCB structure which fades and is disjointed. End stop on every stanza except 5. Speaker is lost in emotion.
In "Material," Ros Barber meditates on the disappearance of a once-ubiquitous object: the cloth handkerchief. Though the poem's speaker found her mother's frilly "hankies" deeply unfashionable as a child, she has since grown nostalgic for the simpler, more personal world those hankies evoke. The speaker laments that modern life is marked by the mass production of cheap, "disposable" objects like paper tissues, and she also feels guilty about not being as attentive a parent as her own mother was.