Compare and contrast Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Compare and contrast - Essay Example In the first stanza, the son holds his mother as she vomits in a bowl and then attended to cleaning and changing her clothes with the help of his lover who is also the speaker. Since the strings were tied behind the back the speaker tried to remove the blanket from underneath the old woman and feared that her skin could tear off. This shows that the mother had become a mere cripple and her condition was too fragile. When old age is referred to second childhood, it is justified and sometimes ironical too. The poet talks about the paper diaper, the fragility and all these could be attributed to the status of a baby – â€Å"Everything’s so fragile here/a breath could break you.† (Crozier, line 14-15) The poet and her lover are at a loss and cannot really decide what to do. The mother who has once offered her milk to her son is now feeling shy when her son was undressing her. Despite the weakness she turns her face away and covers her breasts and the lover cracks a joke here, saying that he has undressed many other women before and so she need not feel shy. The tubes and needles used here reflect the medical treatment she was undergoing. The last two stanzas describe the poet’s feelings about his lover when she lies in bed besides him and what happens at the end of the day. The vision of tending his mother is so vivid in her memory that she almost smells him of his mother although he is washed. It seems as if she has licked him to prove to all the girls who lie with him that he is still his mother’s son. The poet ironically talks of the old woman’s tongue’ and might be a little sarcastic in her remark, may be because her time for fun has been shared by the old woman and she puns on the actions of licking. We find the mammals licking their off springs in stead of bathing them and a woman may lick the man for the sake of lust. To some