Spinning

1. Spinning Stanza 1 • 1st person perspective • Past, looking back • Hand/Arm imagery [hands = your imprint, identity, touching/intimacy] • Line 1 – “My fingers stretched so wide” • Line 3 – “I’d hold my father’s wrists...” • Line 4 – “...he’d lash his arms...” • Line 5 – “... Big red hands...” [security, father big] • Line 7 – “...caught the ball” • Reference to “power saws” and “baseball”, manly activities

2. Spinning Stanza 2 • Spinning image • Line 10-12 - “I’d stumble / to keep up / from habit, not from fear” • Safety, trust and security of childhood • Line 19 – alliteration “perfect propeller” • Line 20 – “I’d get scared / because the higher I flew / the greater the forces / to pull us apart • Children view parents as omniscient yet speaker, when looking back, realizes their is a greater force than power of parent. Dad is actually mortal • Line 25 – “weak hands and narrow shoulders” • Speaker is still just a child/boy

3. Spinning Stanza 3 • Line 28 – “while the fear was still fun” • Oxymoron/contrast. How can fear be fun? It’s fun to be scared as a child or even a big child (i.e. scary movies) • Lines 29-32 • Innocent fun, universal experience Stanza 4 • Childhood memories (security, “in our backyard”) • Line 39-41 – father knew best (i.e. Knew when to stop)

4. Spinning Stanza 5 • Change in perspective, shift in time, speaker is a parent now (“my little girl”, line 42) • Speaker realizes/experiences what his father must have felt. Parent is only human against forces of nature, not omniscient (i.e. “inevitable failure / of even the strongest hands / against the letting go”) Stanza 6 • Line 51 – “still” (speaker pauses) • Speaker realizes that he can hold on long enough for daughter to fly and believe that her dad is powerful like he believed his own father to be • Childhood perspective vs. Adult perspective

5. Beyond Pastel Stanza 1 • Line 1 – Us (kids) vs. Them (them) dichotomy set up (parents getting divorced but don’t tell kids anything) • Lines 5-8 – “...I’ve got nothing” – speaker feels isolated Stanza 2 • Line 9 – “sweet as cold cash” simile • Line 11 – “fat as mushrooms”, simile; mints don’t sound very appealing, mushrooms can be poisonous • Lines 12-13 – “trying to make / earth match the sky” – impossible to do

6. Beyond Pastel Stanza 3 • Line 14 – sister is forever stuck in “...her soft pink world” while speaker has moved “beyond pastel” • Lines 16-18 – mother suggests a practical bedroom design. Use of the word “timeless” is ironic as it suggests things don’t change • Lines 19-21 – “just because something matches doesn’t mean / it will stay that way” allusion to their parents’ marriage. Speaker seems to understand these changes and she “...leaves her [sister] sitting on a roll sucking a mint”

7. Beyond Pastel Stanza 4 • Lines 22-25 – Dad’s rental house; imagery created • Line 25 – “like praying hands” simile; father praying this situation/house will work • Line 27 – “Nothing matches except by accident” – make-shift life Stanza 5 • Line 29 – “Not even the radio is playing”, quiet but not happy • Line 30 – simile; hug from Dad as hard as the hot glare of the sun

8. Beyond Pastel Stanzas 6 & 7 • Mother is fed up with speaker and is ready to “decorate / my new bedroom in whatever colour a teenage girl might like” (lines 34-35) • Final line of poem: “Black, I tell her. It matches everything.” Indicates speakers feelings of depression about her changing life. Black now matches how she feels about everything in her life, depressed.