‘Lucozade’

• What does it make you think of?

• When do you usually drink it?

• Why might someone name a poem after a drink?

First Impressions

After we have read through the poem as a class, discuss with a partner and be prepared to share:

1. What actually happens in the poem? 2. What do you think the main ideas of the poem

are?3. Who do you think is speaking?

What is it about?

Told from the perspective of a 16 year old persona visiting his/her mother in hospital. Charts a turn in the mother’s, and ultimately the speaker’s, attitudes about death.

What is it about?In this poem Jackie Kay describes visiting her mother in hospital. She was a young girl of sixteen, afraid that her mother would die.

The poem not only describes the shock of seeing her mother but conveys the personality of her mother expressively and with humour. Her mother’s ironic questions, her humorous commands, her idiosyncratic remarks may be partially the result of her treatment or operation but strongly suggest a person who faces her hospital experience with spirit and humour. There is something indomitable about her.

The last two stanzas describe the euphoria of relief the poet feels when she realises her mother will not die but has recovered enough to wave from her hospital bed.

The clearing of her mother’s ward cupboard of the traditional gifts an invalid receives, which her mother had decisively rejected, is a cathartic moment for the poet.

For the sixteen-year-old poet, her senses heightened after the trauma of her mother’s hospitalisation, the sight of her mother waving becomes for her a beautiful, almost heavenly vision.

Annotating

Go through the poem by yourself and underline with a pencil any examples of poetic techniques or word choice that stand out to you.

Think about before we go over as a class:What is she trying to say by using these

techniques?

My mum is on a high bed next to sad chrysanthemums.‘Don’t bring flowers, they only wilt and die.’

I am scared my mum is going to dieon the bed next to the sad chrysanthemums.

She nods off and her eyes go back in her head.Next to her bed is a bottle of Lucozade.

‘Orange nostalgia, that’s what that is,’ she says.‘Don’t bring Lucozade either,’ then fades.

Tone: Simple and confessionalReflects the speaker’s age/fear Distance from speaker – pedestal/alter

transferred epithet sadness onto the flowers: adjective describes noun other than thing it is actually describing

stereotypical gift - rejecting

inevitable image of death/fading

Simple direct confession

Connects mother to flowers – people also inevitably dieSymmetrical structure – speaker’s age

lack of energy - fading

Metaphor

rejects nostalgia/another stereotypical marker of illness

Continues idea of light going out. Vitality ebbing

‘The whole day was a blur, a swarm of eyes.Those doctors with their white lies.

Did you think you could cheer me up with a Woman’s Own?Don’t bring magazines, too much about size.’

My mum wakes up, groggy and low.‘What I want to know,’ she says,’ is this:

where’s the big brandy, the generous gin, the Bloody Mary,the biscuit tin, the chocolate gingers, the dirty big meringue?’

indistinct/unclear/senses fading metaphorfeeling objectified

idea of drs telling half truths. She doesn’t want to hear these.

rhetorical question

magazine – traditional hospital gift cannot bring happiness

dieting and obsession with weight reminder of gauntness through illness

ironic link with alcohol she asks formarks turning point from negatives to positives

alliteration of b and g sounds internal rhyme of gin and tin – marks positivity

List of several luxuries: emphasise the indulgence, extravagance and life affirming nature of her requests

I am sixteen; I’ve never tasted a Bloody Mary.‘Tell your father to bring a luxury,’ says she.

‘Grapes have no imagination, they’re just green.Tell him: stop the neighbours coming.’

I clear her cupboard in Ward 10B, Stobhill Hospital.I leave, bags full, Lucozade, grapes, oranges,

sad chrysanthemums under my arms,weighted down. I turn round, wave with her flowers.

Emphasises youth of the speaker vs. the experience/age of mother. Suggests the situation is bewildering

transferred epithet/personification

ambiguous request: is she too ill or just sick of the ‘swarm of eyes’?Another rejection of hospital etiquette.

criticism of traditional gifts

metaphorically heavy with sadness/emotion

objects being removed suggests death

waving – suggests a final goodbye

My mother, on her high hospital bed, waves back.Her face is light and radiant, dandelion hours.Her sheets billow and whirl. She is beautiful.

Next to her the empty table is divine.

I carry the orange nostalgia home singing an old song.

separation of waving back by the stanza shows distance

energy has returned

optimistic/unburdened metaphor:

lightness and beauty. Delicate and fragile.

angelic connotations

soft consonant vowel sounds transformative ritual

daughter unburdens mother

repeated from earlier, but this time positive tone

carrying the objects away has revived in in a way that the Lucozade itself could not.

joyful, happy connotations

Main Ideas

– Symmetrical structure of the poem balanced around the colon in line 14 marks the move from the depiction of a stereotypical hospital death-bed, to a redefinition (on the Mother’s own terms) of how she will face death. The poem serves as a reflection on the speaker’s changing attitude towards her mother’s death.

– (While the poem could be read more generally about illness – that the daughter’s actions literally bring energy and vitality back to the mother - it is hard to read the penultimate stanza, with its heavenly connotations, this way. A literal reading would also grossly simplify and obscure the poem’s complex themes of how embracing life can be the best response to death, and how death itself is coloured only by our attitudes towards it)

– There is also a shift in the speaker’s perspective and tone between the poem’s opening and ending. This appears to be caused by her ability to perform the cleansing ritual of removing all the symbols of sickness from the Mother’s bedside.

– The title – ‘Lucozade’ – is complex. It refers to the literal bottle (one of the aforementioned traditional symbols of sickness), but there is also a sense that the daughter’s actions are the real revitalising energy boost that the Mother needs.

– The idea of Lucozade as a childhood memory associated with being ill (‘orange nostalgia’) is

also explored in the poem, and there is a clear sense that in the final line, that the daughter’s final act for her Mother might be a memory in the making – a moment looked back on nostalgically in the future.