In both ‘Poem for My Sister’ and ‘To a Daughter Leaving Home’ the speakers describe feelings about watching someone they love grow up. What are the similarities and/or differences between the ways the poets present those feelings?

https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/english/AQA-87022-SQP.PDF - the sample paper where both poems can be found. In both ‘To a Daughter Leaving Home’ and ‘Poem for My Sister’, the poets express fear and anxiety for the person they love as they watch them grow older. In both, this fear for the vulnerability of this young person in a harsh world is expressed physically - in ‘To a Daughter Leaving Home’, verbs such as 'wobbled', combined with the onomatopoeic 'crash' and 'thud' show the speaker's fear for her daughter's 'breakability' - she is described as growing 'more breakable' the further away she cycles. This is mirrored in ‘Poem for My Sister’, the speaker's sister is similarly described as 'wobbling' about in the speaker's shoes. Here, also, her 'spindle-thin' legs further contribute to the sense of physical vulnerability and 'breakability', as in ‘To a Daughter Leaving Home’. In both poems, there is also a strong sense of loss of childhood and innocence, and both use the respective actions in the poems - cycling and trying on adult shoes - as metaphors to express this loss. In ‘To a Daughter Leaving Home’, the last line is perhaps the both evident example of this, with the speaker's daughter's hair described as 'flapping behind [her] like a handkerchief waving goodbye'. Here, the poem ends on the thought that the speaker's daughter is 'saying goodbye', with the 'cycling away' demonstrating that she is now independent. In ‘Poem for My Sister’, however, the sorrow is more obviously about the harshness of the outside world - the speaker wants to preserve her sister's innocence rather than watch her face the hardships the speaker knows come with being an adult - 'I should not like to see her in my shoes.' Instead, the speaker writes, she would prefer her to 'stay sure footed, sensibly shod' - meaning she wishes her sister to remain grounded and happy rather than wishing to grow up too fast.

Answered by Niamh M. English tutor

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