The poignant depiction of the grandmother in this poem derives from the demeaning reality of aging, that juxtaposes with her youthful, competent past. This creates a mental dissonance, which the poet uses to home in on the battle against despair at the end of our lives, and the stubborn clinging onto what we remember of our identity.

The grandmother’s knitting is deemed as unnecessary from the onset of the poem. Opening three of the five stanzas is the anaphora ‘there is no need they say’, or variations of that discouraging line. Immediately, iambic meter is established, then broken which mimics a faltering confidence. More importantly, the fact that this pattern in meter is seen in three stanzas delineates a cyclical attack on the grandmother’s self-image, which heavily relies on contributing to the family. Hence, each time her usefulness is rejected, it invites the readers to sympathize with the grandmother’s decaying instrumental identity. Similarly, the words ‘need’ and ‘necessity’ are fixed at the end of almost every stanza, effectively chiming an epiphora that repeatedly pounds like a brash alarm terminating each memory, every dream, and signaling the end of her importance. As the readers try to sympathize with the grandmother, each ending of necessity further tightens our headache to something poignant and desperate.

However, despite not being needed, ‘the needles still move’. This polyptoton between ‘need’ and ‘needle’ ties the knot perfectly between the ‘need’ for the grandmother and the needle as the symbol which her value is attached to, euphemizing, or perhaps not even, the little value she now holds as an overly eager tailor. Following the needle is a polyptoton of ‘hand’, which is cleverly distributed in the first stanza by careful enjambments that seamlessly link the grandmother’s current work to a flashback of her old life. Here, we learn of the importance of sewing to the grandmother as a sure and resounding reminder of her past, her hands are almost still ‘the skillful hands of the fisher-girl.’ There is a mastery over her knitting that she has retained from her youth, ‘the rhythms in the workings of your hands.’ Visually, these two lines (3 and 6) are longer than the rest, and are both linked by the grandmother’s mastery over the needle; simultaneously, the rhythm in these two lines return to iambic meter, which, combined with the longer line length, strengthening the tie between the grandmother’s knitting skill and her confidence. This idea is further embellished in stanza two where though her ‘grasp of things is not so good’ she is a ‘master of [her] moments then, deft and swift.’ The grandmother’s dementia is a symbol of her fading identity. However, despite her weakening mind, the grandmother becomes admirable through the description of ‘deft and swift’, which weaves between consonance that are hard to pronounce in as if to sound out her agility and proficiency.

The proficiency of the grandmother’s hands opens the way to the discussion of her past, which is depicted as the polar opposite to her current state of feebleness. Again, the persona links work and importance to ‘hands’, which were ‘once the hands of the bride; ‘hands of the mother/ of six’, that ‘scrubbed his back’ and ‘mended scraped and slaved slapped’. In this stanza there is a great connotation of achievement, which is interestingly created through the use of many verbs. ‘Scrubbed, mended, scraped, slapped’ are all things that would be difficult for an elderly person to do, and in the face of age they seem like abilities locked behind a stronger body, a stronger past, bringing the readers into the enviously reminiscent mind of the grandmother. Additionally, there is a semantic field which clearly defines the grandmother’s past roles: ‘bride, wife, mother’ painting her as the centerpiece of a functioning family. However, in doing so, her past importance eerily juxtaposes the present, where the grandmother’s roles are fading away, perhaps even precipitating a loss of identity, a loss of certainty, a loss of direction…

Indeed, that seems to be the case for the grandmother in this poem, but she is clearly resisting that loss of identity. Her grandchildren have ‘too much already’, ‘there is no necessity’, ‘too many scarves and cardigans –’. The repeated use of ‘too much’ suggests that the grandmother has no more reason to keep knitting, yet she does, because she does not knit for her grandchildren, but for herself. ‘There is no necessity’ from the grandchildren’s perspective, but there is more importantly, the need to keep herself occupied and the fear of boredom. What pumps through those hands are not driven by ‘necessity’ but by desire: the desire to have a place in the world by doing what she has ‘mastery over’. Knitting gives the grandmother a person to be, and despite how it makes her hands ‘painful’, ‘Swollen-jointed. Red. Arthritic… the needles still move’. These one word sentences are made harsh by the fricative and plosive cacophony, mimicking pain and the cracking sound joints that come with an old body. However, most importantly, this diction of illness goes to show the willful persistence of the grandmother to keep knitting, ‘as if your hands remembered of their own accord’. Here, the word ‘remembered’ stands out clean against dementia and confusion, because what the brain forgets the muscle remembers. Thus, the act of knitting becomes an empowering verb, where the last strands of her identity becomes imbued within the act. She cannot stop, her ‘hands had forgotten how to’. This line ends the poem on a sad and deeply touching note, chemamorphising the grandmother to an automatic thing, a machine that cannot shut off. There seems to be a lack of control here with the position of power being shifted completely onto the hands, and the hands, a symbol of labor of value to society, is the last thing we cling to in the face of dementia, the final confusion, and the discontentment with our withering body.

In conclusion, the grandmother is deemed unnecessary by the world, and because of that, suffers a loss of identity. She clings to her identity by producing value to her family, even though that value is not externally recognized. In our final ages, riddled with dementia, nothing becomes as freeing as a moment of clarity, and the grandmother’s muscle memory of knitting becomes the final breaths of her own identity before drifting down into the depth of her lost memories.