Quiz: Mothers and Fathers - The Answers

1. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or / next-to-last, of three loved houses went Elizabeth Bishop / One Art

2. The Child is father of the Man Wordsworth / The Rainbow

3. Have you news of my boy Jack? Kipling / My Boy Jack

4. How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men! / I kissed your mouth and pledged my self forever Don Paterson / Waking with Russell

5. Do they know they’re old, / These two who are my father and my mother / whose fire, from which I came, has now grown cold? Elizabeth Jennings / One Flesh

6. When our daughter found him lying in the shavings, trans- / mogrified backwards from a living body / into a bolt of rodent bread / she turned her back on early motherhood / and went on single, with nothing. Sharon Olds / Forty-one, Along, No Gerbil

7. Ma’s face is black with hair / her hands all paws. She does not know me anymore. Maura Dooley / 1847

8. I get down on my knees and do what must be done / And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son Michael Longley / Ceasefire

9. A large transparent baby like a skeleton in a red tree Peter Redgrove / The Visible Baby

10. The moment she died, my mother’s dancedresses / turned from the colours they really were / to the colours I imagine them to be Liz Lochhead / Sorting Through

11. I am your mother, / and we are kind to snails Fleur Adcock / For a Five Year Old

12. When all the others were away at Mass / I was all hers as we peeled potatoes Seamus Heaney / From Clearances

13. How selfhood begins with a walking away, / And love is proved in the letting go C Day Lewis / Walking Away

14. One marked in circles by a vase of water, / One wounded, when a tidy fit had seized her, / And coloured, by her daughter. Larkin / Love Songs in Age

15. This is my son, mine own Telemachus, / To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle Tennyson / Ulysses

16. Farewell, thou Child of my right hand, and joy! / My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy Ben Jonson / On My First Son

17. Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, / Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, / Fill up the interspersed vacancies / And momentary pauses of the thought! Coleridge / Frost at Midnight

18. Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me D H Lawrence / Piano

19. It was the first gift he ever gave her, / buying it for five five francs in the Galeries / in pre-war Paris. It was stifling. / A starless drought made the nights stormy. Eavan Boland / The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me

20. As a decrepit father takes delight / To see his active child do deeds of youth, / So I, made lame by Fortune's dearest spite, / Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth. (Shakespeare / Sonnet 37)

21. "I have answered three questions, and that is enough" Lewis Carroll, You Are Old, Father William

22. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter / And on her daughter / They wash their feet in soda water (Eliot / The Waste Land )

23. But the landlord's black-eyed daughter, / Bess, the landlord's daughter, / Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair. (Alfred Noyes / The Highwayman)

24. It dawned on me, aw of a sudden / the sickening reason Paw wis changing./ I'd been the mug. I didnae want tae face / whit was staring me in the face. Jackie Kay / There’s Trouble for Maw Broon

25. A man in black with a Meinkampf look (Daddy / Sylvia Plath)