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Grade 9 Notes: Climbing My Grandfather

Andrew Waterhouse · A Love and Relationships poem on AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) — not on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE (4ET1) · Climbing My Grandfather

Climbing My Grandfather is a single extended metaphor: a grandchild climbs up the body of the speaker's grandfather as if he were a mountain. The climber decides to do it without a rope or net. The climber starts at the old, dusty, cracked shoes, scrambles up the trousers, gets round the overhanging shirt and reaches the belt; the climber finds holds on an earth-stained hand with splintered nails, notices the thick, smooth skin of a finger, crosses a scar where old stitches still show, rests at a shoulder that is still firm, pulls upward by the loose skin of the neck to a smiling mouth, crosses the cheek, looks into brown eyes, passes the wrinkles of the forehead and reaches the thick white hair at the top. There, out of breath, the climber lies and watches clouds and birds circling, feels the old man's warmth and the slow beat of his heart. Revise it as a poem about closeness between generations, getting to know someone, and ageing. Notice how every climbing word does double work, how the signs of age are mapped like the features of a landscape, and how the ending moves from effort to stillness. The poem is in copyright and no quotation from it could be checked against the poet's or publisher's own text, so these notes quote nothing: every moment is described closely enough to find on the page. If the poem is printed on your paper, quote it from there.

Build your reading of Climbing My Grandfather, teach it to an AI pupil, then defend it in a marked debate — this page carries all three.

What is this exam testing?

Climbing My Grandfather is examined on one course Incandio supports: AQA GCSE English Literature (8702), as one of the fifteen poems in the Love and Relationships cluster on Paper 2. You meet it in one of two ways — printed on the paper as the named poem, or remembered as the poem you choose to set beside a different named poem. Both routes reward the same three things: an argument of your own (AO1), close attention to how the poem's language, form and structure make that argument (AO2), and context that genuinely changes how a line reads (AO3 — on this course AO3 means context, not comparison). For Climbing My Grandfather that means a view about what the poem does with a grandchild and a grandfather, a set of precisely described moments from the climb, and one or two pieces of context — the closeness and distance between generations, and a poet whose work often turns to the natural world and to family — welded to a moment.

AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) — Paper 2, Section B: Poetry (Love and Relationships)

Section B asks one comparative question on the cluster. One poem is named and printed; you choose a second from the same cluster and write about it from memory. There is no separate mark for comparing: comparison is the task itself, credited through the quality of your argument and your analysis. Accuracy of spelling and grammar (AO4) is not credited on this question, though clear writing still carries the argument. On Pearson Edexcel International GCSE the same AO codes mean different things; never carry them across.

AO1 · A personal, critical response, supported by references

What the examiner wants: An argument about what the extended metaphor does with the relationship, not a retelling of the climb. The strongest answers ask what it means to treat a person as a mountain: someone huge, old and weathered, to be explored with care and some risk, and reached at last.

Scoring highly: Range across the whole ascent: the decision to climb without a rope or net; the shoes and clothes; the working hand and the scar; the firm shoulder; the face and eyes; the white hair at the top; the closing stillness and heartbeat. Keep a second poem in every paragraph.

Top band vs the band below: Top answers read the structure as meaning: noticing that the poem climbs from feet to head is an observation; arguing that the climb is a slow act of getting to know a whole person, so that the reward at the summit is not a view but the feel of his heartbeat — knowledge turned into closeness — is a concept.

The common mistake: Treating the mountain as literal, or describing the climb stage by stage without ever saying what the metaphor shows about the relationship.

In your essay: Open with a comparative thesis that names both poems and the difference that matters, then build three or four paragraphs that each hold both poems, and finish on what the pairing shows that neither poem shows alone.

AO2 · Language, form and structure, with subject terminology

What the examiner wants: Analysis of Waterhouse's methods: the extended metaphor of mountaineering; climbing vocabulary given to clothes and skin; the contrast between warmth and cold in the finger skin likened to ice; the body read as a landscape of age; the single unbroken stanza; free verse and enjambment; the first person and the present tense.

Scoring highly: Read the double vocabulary: every word belongs both to the mountain and to the man, so a shirt becomes an overhang and wrinkles become the contours of a rock face. The reader holds both pictures at once, which is the closeness the poem describes.

Top band vs the band below: The best answers notice that the poem is one unbroken stanza that never stops for breath until the climber does: the form enacts a single continuous effort, and the climb only comes to rest when the climber lies still at the top, feeling the slow pulse beneath the climber's body.

The common mistake: Calling it an extended metaphor and stopping there, without explaining what the particular climbing words reveal.

In your essay: In each paragraph name the method, pin down the words or moment doing the work, say what it does to a reader, then say what the partner poem does differently. Make at least one point about form or structure.

AO3 · Context — the relationship between the poem and the world it comes from

What the examiner wants: How the poem's world shapes it: the bond between grandparents and grandchildren, often a relationship of play, patience and physical closeness; and a poet whose work, as teaching resources on him note, often turned to the natural world and to family.

Scoring highly: One clause at a time: because a grandparent is often the oldest person a child knows well, the signs of age the climber passes — a scar, loose skin, wrinkles, white hair — become a child's first map of a long life.

Top band vs the band below: Context that generates a reading: because Waterhouse's poems often join the natural world and family, the mountain metaphor can be read as more than a game — it treats an old man with the respect and awe a climber gives a mountain, something ancient, weathered and larger than oneself.

The common mistake: Paragraphs about mountaineering or about the poet that never touch a moment in the poem.

In your essay: Two or three contextual clauses across the essay, each welded to a moment in a poem and each changing what that moment means. Never a paragraph of background on its own.

Avoid. Reading the poem as only about a child's game. The game is the vehicle; the subject is how one person comes to know and love another.

Examiner insight. A strong comparative opening names a method: both Waterhouse and Heaney build a child's admiration for an older man through an extended physical image, but Heaney's father is a ship under sail with the small child stumbling in his wake, while Waterhouse's grandfather is a mountain the child climbs all the way to the top.

If you choose this as your partner poem, carry its shape: one unbroken stanza; a decision to climb without a rope or net; an ascent from the shoes, through the clothes, the hand, the arm, the shoulder and the face, to the white hair; and a summit of rest, sky and heartbeat.

The speaker and the figures

The climber (the speaker)

A grandchild who climbs the grandfather like a mountain and reaches, at the top, the feel of the old man's heartbeat

The speaker tells the poem in the first person and the present tense, as if the climb is happening now. The speaker decides to climb without a rope or net, and works a way up from the grandfather's old, dusty, cracked shoes, over the trousers and the overhanging shirt, past the belt, onto an earth-stained hand whose splintered nails give the climber holds. The climber notices the skin of a finger, thick and smooth, like ice that is warm; crosses a scar on the arm where the old stitches still show; rests at a shoulder that is still firm; pulls upward by the loose skin of the neck to a smiling mouth, crosses the cheek and looks into brown eyes; then passes the wrinkles of the forehead and reaches the thick white hair. At the summit the climber is out of breath and lies still, watching clouds and birds circle, feeling the grandfather's warmth and the slow beat of his heart. The climber is adventurous, observant, a little daring, and in the end quiet and content: the reward for the effort is closeness. The poem never says whether the speaker is a grandson or a granddaughter, so neither should an essay.

Setting out without a rope

The poem begins with a decision. The climber chooses to do this the bold way, with no safety equipment at all.

Key moment. The climber deciding to make the climb free, without a rope or net (Opening line). The opening sets up the whole metaphor and its stakes. With no rope or net there is risk; but there is also trust. A child who climbs a grandfather without protection is sure that the grandfather will not drop the child.

Key moment. The start of the climb at the old, dusty, cracked shoes (Early lines). The climb begins at the ground, at the oldest and most worn part of the man. The cracks in the shoes are like cracks in rock at the foot of a mountain, and they are the first sign of age.

Key moment. The scramble up the trousers and around the overhanging shirt to the belt (Early lines). Ordinary clothes are turned into the features of a climb: easy ground, then an overhang to get round. The everyday becomes an adventure through a child's imagination.

Getting closer: hand, finger and scar

As the climb goes on, the climber stops to notice details. The poem slows down to look at the grandfather's hands and arm, where the evidence of a long working life is written.

Key moment. The earth-stained hand whose splintered nails give the climber a grip (Middle). The hand is a working hand, marked by soil. What might seem ugly — broken nails — is useful to the climber. Damage becomes a foothold: the grandfather's hard life literally supports the child.

Key moment. The skin of a finger, thick and smooth, compared to ice that is warm (Middle). The comparison joins opposites: ice is cold and slippery, yet this is warm. The skin is weathered smooth like ice on a mountain, but it is alive and warm. The child feels both the hardness of age and the warmth of the man.

Key moment. The scar on the arm, where the climber steps over the old stitches (Middle). A scar is a record of an injury long ago. The climber crosses it as a climber would cross a ridge or crack, without being told its story. The grandfather has a past the child can touch but does not know.

The face and the summit

The last part of the climb crosses the face, the most personal part of the body, and arrives at the top. The effort ends in rest.

Key moment. The rest at a shoulder that is still firm (Middle). The word still matters: the shoulder is firm despite everything else showing age. It is a place of safety, a ledge to rest on, and a sign that the grandfather's strength remains.

Key moment. The pull up the loose skin of the neck to the smiling mouth (Later lines). Loose skin is a sign of age, but the mouth is smiling. The grandfather is not a mountain that resists; he is enjoying the game and the child.

Key moment. The climber looking into the grandfather's brown eyes (Later lines). Eye contact in the middle of a climb: the moment when the mountain is plainly a person, looking back. The metaphor gives way, for a moment, to recognition.

Key moment. At the summit, out of breath, the climber lying still, watching clouds and birds circle, feeling the warmth and the slow heartbeat (Closing lines). The poem's reward. The summit gives no view of distant land but a feeling of closeness: the grandfather's heat and the slow beat of his heart. The child has reached, at the top, the life inside the man.

How Waterhouse builds the climber in language and structure

The climber speaks in the first person and the present tense. The climb is not told as a story that happened once; it is happening as we read, and the reader climbs alongside the speaker. If the speaker is an adult remembering, the present tense keeps the memory vivid and close.

The climber's vocabulary belongs to mountaineering: a free climb, an easy scramble, an overhang, holds, a rest, a summit. These words are given to clothes, skin and hair, so the reader is always seeing two things at once — a man and a mountain.

The climber notices with the hands as much as with the eyes. The texture of the shoes, the grip of the nails, the smooth skin of the finger, the stitches of the scar, the heat at the top: this is a poem of touch, which suits a child's physical closeness to a grandparent.

The single unbroken stanza carries the climber from the bottom to the top without a pause in the layout. Only at the summit, where the climber lies still and gasping for breath, does the movement stop.

The climber in context

A familiar game. Many children play at climbing on a grandparent, and many adults remember doing so. The poem takes a familiar, physical game and turns it into an exploration: by the time the climb reaches the top, the child has passed over the evidence of a whole life.

Nature and family. Andrew Waterhouse's poems, as teaching resources on his work point out, often turn to the natural world and to family. Here the two meet: a family relationship is imagined as a landscape.

Relationships

  • The speaker's grandfather — The mountain the speaker climbs: huge, old, weathered, warm and alive.
  • The climb — The game through which the child comes to know the man.

What The climber (the speaker) stands for

  • The mountain: an old man's size, age and permanence in a child's eyes.
  • The rope and net: the safety the climber chooses to do without, and the trust that replaces it.
  • The summit and the heartbeat: arriving at the life inside a person.

Why Waterhouse made The climber (the speaker)

  • To show a child exploring and coming to know an older relative.
  • To present love as effort, attention and trust.
  • To let the reward of the climb be closeness rather than conquest.

Other readings

  • A confident child at play, unafraid because the child trusts the grandfather.
  • An adult remembering a childhood game, so that the present tense keeps the memory alive.
  • Someone mapping a whole life, from the worn shoes to the white hair.

Essay arguments

  • Waterhouse presents a grandchild whose climb up the grandfather turns an old man's body into a landscape to be explored, so that love is shown as patient, physical attention.
  • The climber's decision to go without a rope or net presents the relationship as one of trust: the risk is real in the metaphor, but the child is sure that the grandfather will hold firm.
  • The summit presents the reward of closeness: not a distant view but the warmth and slow heartbeat of the man beneath the climber.

In theme essays

  • Family and closeness.
  • Getting to know someone.
  • Age and time.

Questions that get asked

  • How does Waterhouse present the relationship between a grandchild and a grandparent in Climbing My Grandfather and one other poem from Love and Relationships?
  • How do poets present a child's admiration for an older relative?

The grandfather

An old man treated as a mountain: weathered, scarred, still firm, smiling and warm

The grandfather never speaks and never moves in the poem, except that his mouth smiles and his heart beats. He is presented entirely through his body and clothes, as the climber passes over them. He is old: his shoes are worn and cracked, his skin is loose at the neck, his forehead is lined with wrinkles and his hair is white. He has worked with his hands — the hand is stained with earth and the nails are splintered — and he has been hurt, for there is a scar with the marks of stitches on his arm. But he is not frail. His shoulder is still firm, his skin is warm, and his heart beats slowly and steadily under the child at the top. He is a figure of size, endurance and quiet kindness.

Weathered like a mountain

Everything about the grandfather that shows age is described as if it were a feature of a mountain worn by weather and time.

Key moment. The old shoes, dusty and cracked (Early lines). His footwear is worn by years of use. Like rock at the foot of a mountain, it shows the long action of time.

Key moment. The earth-stained hand with splintered nails (Middle). The grandfather's hands show manual work, perhaps in the soil. They are rough, but they hold the child up.

Key moment. The scar on the arm with the marks of old stitches (Middle). An old injury, healed. The grandfather has a history of pain and recovery that the poem does not tell.

Strong, warm and alive

Against the signs of age, the poem places signs of strength and life. The mountain is a living man.

Key moment. The shoulder that is still firm (Middle). The strength of the grandfather remains. He is still able to bear a child's weight.

Key moment. The smiling mouth (Later lines). The grandfather is enjoying this. He is a willing mountain, patient and amused.

Key moment. The slow beat of his heart felt at the summit (Closing lines). The last thing in the poem is the grandfather's heartbeat: slow, steady, alive. It is the most private evidence of a person and the climax of the climb.

How Waterhouse builds the grandfather in language and structure

The grandfather is built from nouns of the body and its clothing, each paired with a detail of age or work: shoes that are cracked, a hand stained with earth, nails that are splintered, a scar with stitches, loose skin, wrinkles, white hair.

He is given almost no action. His mouth smiles and his heart beats; everything else is the climber's movement. The stillness suits a mountain — and makes the smile and the heartbeat stand out as signs of life.

He is described from the bottom up. The order of the climb is the order in which the reader meets him, so the most personal parts — the face, the eyes, the heart — come last.

The grandfather in context

The oldest person a child knows. A grandparent is often the oldest person a young child knows well. The signs of age the climber passes over — wrinkles, loose skin, white hair, an old scar — are the marks of a life longer than the child can imagine, which is part of why the metaphor of a mountain fits.

A working life, untold. The earth on the hand and the broken nails suggest a life of physical work; the poem gives no job and no history, so any account of what that work was belongs to the reader's inference, not to the text.

Relationships

  • His grandchild — The child who climbs him and comes to know him by touch.

What The grandfather stands for

  • The mountain: endurance, age and size.
  • The scar and wrinkles: a long life marked on the body.
  • The heartbeat: the life within.

Why Waterhouse made The grandfather

  • To show an old man through a child's loving attention.
  • To balance the signs of age with signs of strength and warmth.

Other readings

  • A heroic figure in a child's eyes.
  • A man worn by work and time but still strong.
  • A presence remembered by an adult who once climbed him.

Essay arguments

  • Waterhouse presents the grandfather as a mountain worn by time — cracked, scarred, wrinkled — yet still firm, warm and smiling, so age appears as endurance rather than decline.
  • The grandfather is silent throughout; he is known only through what the child touches and sees, which makes the poem a portrait made by attention.

In theme essays

  • Family and closeness.
  • Age and time.

Questions that get asked

  • How is the grandfather presented in Climbing My Grandfather?
  • How do poets present older family members in Climbing My Grandfather and one other poem?

The themes

Family and closeness

Love shown as physical closeness and attention.

The poem never names love, but it is full of it. The child is allowed to climb all over the old man; the grandfather smiles; the child ends lying on top of him, feeling his heat and heartbeat. The relationship is shown entirely through touch and closeness.

The climb is also an act of attention. The child notices every detail on the way up: the cracks in the shoes, the stains on the hand, the stitches of the scar, the colour of the eyes, the spacing of the wrinkles. To look at someone this closely is a form of love.

The relationship is trusting on both sides. The child climbs without a rope or net, sure that the mountain will hold the climber; the grandfather lets himself be climbed. In mountaineering, a climb without protection is dangerous; here, the danger is only in the metaphor, because the trust is real.

The poem ends not with triumph but with peace. The child does not plant a flag, but lies still and feels the warmth and heartbeat of the body beneath. The closeness is the reward.

Use this in an essay. Waterhouse presents love between generations as attention made physical: by climbing the grandfather inch by inch and noticing every crack, stain and scar, the child comes to know him, and the reward at the top is not a view but the slow beat of the old man's heart.

Getting to know someone

Exploring a person like a landscape.

A mountain has to be explored to be known. By treating the grandfather as a mountain, the child turns the relationship into a journey of discovery. Each stage of the climb reveals something more.

The order matters. The climb begins at the shoes and clothes — the outside, the parts anyone can see — and moves through the working hands and the scarred arm to the face and eyes, and finally the heart. The child moves from surface to depth, from what a stranger might notice to what only family can know.

Some things remain unknown. The scar is crossed but its story is not told; the earth on the hands suggests work that is not named. The child can touch the evidence of the grandfather's past without understanding it all. Getting to know someone, the poem suggests, means coming close to things you cannot fully explain.

Some readers take the climb as an image of a whole relationship, the years it takes for a grandchild to know a grandparent. Present this as a reading: the text shows a single climb.

Age and time (minor)

A body marked by a long life.

The grandfather's body is a record of age: cracked shoes, an earth-stained hand, splintered nails, a scar, loose skin, wrinkles and white hair. Mountains are shaped by weather over long ages; the grandfather has been shaped by a long life.

The poem does not treat age as sad. The shoulder is still firm, the skin is warm, the mouth smiles and the heart beats. Age here is endurance, like a mountain's. But the slow heartbeat at the end can also be heard as a reminder that this life will not last forever.

The difference in age between climber and climbed is the poem's starting point. Only a small child can climb a man; only an old man has a body so marked by time. The metaphor depends on the two ends of a family, one at the start of life and one far along it.

Memory (minor)

A moment kept in the present tense.

The poem can be read as a memory, told by an adult who once climbed a grandfather as a child. The present tense brings the memory back to life, as if the climb were still going on. Present this as a reading; the poem itself does not say when it is spoken.

If it is a memory, the slow heartbeat at the end becomes more poignant: an adult recalling the feel of a grandparent's heart may be remembering someone no longer there. The poem does not say whether the grandfather is alive or dead, and an essay should not claim to know.

Context

Context: the poet and the bond between generations

The poet. Andrew Waterhouse was born in Lincolnshire in 1958. His first full collection, In, was published by The Rialto in 2000 and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection that year. He died in 2001, at the age of forty-two, and a second collection of the poems he had been gathering, called 2nd, was published by The Rialto in 2002. Teaching resources on his work note that his poems often turn to the natural world and to family; Climbing My Grandfather brings the two together, imagining a person as a landscape.

Grandparents and grandchildren. The bond between grandparents and grandchildren is often one of play, patience and physical closeness, with less of the strain that can come between parents and children. A grandparent is often the oldest person a young child knows well, and a child's frank curiosity about an old body — wrinkles, white hair, loose skin — is part of how that closeness feels. The poem builds on this ordinary experience and gives it the scale and seriousness of a mountain climb.

Use context in single clauses attached to moments: the mountain metaphor with a poet drawn to the natural world; the signs of age with a child meeting old age close up for the first time. Never claim to know whose grandfather this was.

Form, voice and comparison

Form: one unbroken climb

The poem is a single stanza of free verse, with no regular rhyme scheme and lines of varying length. There are no stanza breaks to rest in, so the poem reads as one continuous ascent from the shoes to the summit.

Enjambment carries the sense from one line to the next, the way a climber moves from hold to hold without stopping. The movement only comes to rest when the climber does, lying out of breath at the top.

The first person and the present tense make the climb immediate. The reader is not told about a climb; the reader climbs.

Structure: from the feet to the heart

The poem is organised by the climb itself, from the bottom of the body to the top: shoes, trousers, shirt, belt, hand, finger, arm, shoulder, neck, mouth, cheek, eyes, forehead, hair. The reader meets the grandfather in the order the climber does.

The order moves from the outside to the inside: from clothes, which anyone can see, to skin and scars, then to the face and eyes, and at the very end to the heartbeat, which can only be felt from very close. The structure is a movement into intimacy.

The climax is not a view but a feeling. Mountains are usually climbed for what can be seen from the top; this summit gives clouds, birds and sky, but its real reward is the warmth and pulse beneath the climber.

Language: two pictures at once

The extended metaphor runs through every line. Climbing vocabulary — a free climb, a scramble, an overhang, holds, a rest, a summit — is applied to clothes and skin. The reader holds a man and a mountain in mind at the same time.

Tactile words dominate: dusty, cracked, earth-stained, splintered, smooth, loose, warm. The child knows the grandfather through touch. The comparison of the finger skin to ice that is warm joins opposites, the hardness of age and the warmth of life.

Signs of age are presented without disgust. Loose skin, wrinkles and a scar are simply features of the terrain, noticed with interest. A child's frank curiosity treats them as part of the man.

Symbols: rope, mountain, summit, heartbeat

The mountain is the grandfather: large, old, weathered and enduring. The missing rope and net stand for the trust the child places in him. The summit is the end of the journey of knowing, and the heartbeat is what the journey finds — the life at the centre of the man.

The clouds and birds circling at the top bring the open sky into the poem, as if the child, lying on the grandfather, were on a real peak. For a moment the game and the mountain feel equally real.

Key words and what they carry

extended metaphor: A comparison kept up through a whole poem. Here, the grandfather is a mountain from the first line to the last.

free climb: In everyday terms, a climb without the rope and safety equipment that would catch a fall. The poem's opening choice.

overhang: A part of a rock face that juts out over the climber. Here, the shirt hanging over the belt.

summit: The top of a mountain. Here, the white hair at the top of the head.

oxymoron: A phrase joining opposites. The finger skin likened to ice that is warm is the clearest example.

Precise terms support analysis: an overhang is a hazard a climber has to get round, so even the grandfather's clothes become part of the adventure; the summit is where the climb rests, and the poem rests there too.

Comparison: the strongest partners

Follower (Heaney) is the strongest partner: both poems present a child's admiration for an older man in the family through an extended physical image. Heaney's father is a ship under full sail, with the small child stumbling in his wake; Waterhouse's grandfather is a mountain the child climbs to the top. Heaney ends with a reversal, the father stumbling behind the grown child; Waterhouse ends at rest, at the summit, feeling a heartbeat.

Walking Away (Day-Lewis) and Mother, any distance (Armitage) look at the bond between generations from the point of separation: a parent watching a young child drift away, a grown child measuring a new house while the mother holds the end of a tape. Waterhouse's poem moves in the opposite direction — towards closeness, ending with the child lying on the grandfather. Eden Rock (Causley) also ends on a peaceful image of family, though there the speaker sees their young parents waiting across a stream.

Grade 9 insight. Compare methods: Waterhouse's mountain metaphor against Heaney's ship and plough; Armitage's tape measure as a bond stretched almost to breaking; the closeness of Waterhouse's summit against the distance in Day-Lewis and Armitage.

Readings to weigh

Another reading. A celebration reading: the poem honours a grandfather and the trusting closeness between a child and an old man.

Another reading. A journey-of-knowing reading: the climb is an image of coming to know a whole person, from the outside in.

Another reading. A memory or elegy reading: an adult recalls a grandparent, and the slow heartbeat at the end carries a sense of time and loss. The poem does not say whether he is alive; present this as a reading.

Shock the examiner: what most answers miss

Most answers say the poem is an extended metaphor and then retell the climb. The metaphor is the method; the question is what it does. Treating a person as a mountain makes him vast, ancient and worth the effort of a long, careful approach.

The summit gives no view. Real climbers go up for what they can see; this climber lies still and feels. The reward is warmth and a slow heartbeat — closeness, not conquest.

The climb moves from the outside in: clothes, then skin and scars, then face and eyes, then the heart. The structure is a journey into intimacy, from what a stranger sees to what only someone very close can feel.

The finger skin likened to warm ice joins opposites. Age is hard, weathered and cold like a glacier; the man is warm and alive. One comparison holds the whole poem's balance between age and life.

No rope, no net: in climbing that would be reckless. In this relationship it is trust. The opening line sets the stakes and answers them at once.

Thesis statements

  • Waterhouse presents love between a grandchild and grandfather as close, physical attention: the child comes to know the old man by climbing him inch by inch.
  • The extended metaphor of the mountain makes the grandfather vast, weathered and enduring, so that age appears as strength and history rather than decline.
  • By moving from the shoes to the heartbeat, the poem's structure travels from the surface of a person to his centre, ending in intimacy rather than conquest.
  • The decision to climb without a rope or net presents the relationship as one of trust: the danger exists only in the metaphor.
  • The single unbroken stanza enacts one continuous effort that only comes to rest at the summit, where the climber lies still and feels the slow pulse beneath the climber's body.

Essay plans

How does Waterhouse present a family relationship in Climbing My Grandfather and one other poem from Love and Relationships?

Thesis: Both Waterhouse and Heaney present a child's admiration for an older man through an extended physical image, but Heaney's small child stumbles behind a father who becomes, in the end, an old man stumbling behind the grown speaker, while Waterhouse's child climbs the grandfather to the top and rests there — so one poem lets time reverse the admiration and the other keeps it whole.

  1. Imagery: the father as a ship and the grandfather as a mountain.
  2. The child's position: behind and stumbling against climbing upward.
  3. Language: the vocabulary of ploughing against the vocabulary of climbing.
  4. Endings: a reversal that will not go away against a summit of warmth and heartbeat. Conclude on admiration lost and kept.

How do poets present closeness and distance between generations?

Thesis: Armitage and Waterhouse both build a relationship between generations through one extended image, but Armitage's tape measure stretches a grown child away from the mother towards an open sky, while Waterhouse's climb brings a grandchild ever closer to the grandfather until the grandchild lies on top of him feeling his heartbeat.

  1. The extended image: a tape measure against a mountain.
  2. Direction: moving away and up against moving up and in.
  3. Form: Armitage's shape on the page against Waterhouse's single unbroken stanza.
  4. Endings: a choice between falling and flying against stillness and warmth. Conclude on letting go and holding close.

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