GCSE-readyMy Father Would Not Show Us by Ingrid de Kok: context, form and key methods
A speaker sees her father's body after his death and remembers how he hid his illness and dying from his family. This poem is in copyright, so it is described mainly in our own words.
Context and de Kok's purpose
The poem is an elegy, a poem of mourning. It explores grief mixed with hurt: the father protected his family from his suffering, but in doing so shut them out.
Form and structure
It moves between the present, as the speaker views the body in a coffin, and memories of her father when he was alive and at the heart of the home.
The title line, "My father would not show us", returns like a refrain. Later it shifts in wording, suggesting the speaker begins to understand that he perhaps could not show them, rather than would not.
Language and key methods
Contrast between warm childhood memories and the cold, still scene of the body shows how much has been lost.
Imagery of barriers, such as the coffin and curtains, keeps the father separate from his family even in death.
Compare how family relationships are presented in My Father Would Not Show Us and A Child to his Sick Grandfather.
- Both poems show a family member facing the illness or death of an older relative.
- De Kok's free verse and refrain; Baillie's child voice and couplets.
- AO3: de Kok's adult grief; eighteenth-century home care.
Answer: Both de Kok and Baillie present the death of an older family member, but their speakers understand it very differently. Baillie's child speaks cheerfully to his grandfather, offering to lead him with his "knobbed stick", and does not realise that the old man may be dying. De Kok's adult speaker knows the truth only too well, and the returning title line shows her pain that her father kept his dying hidden. Baillie's regular couplets suit a child's innocent voice, while de Kok's uneven free verse mirrors adult grief. In Baillie's poem, the family gathers round the sick man; in de Kok's, the father shuts his family out, so the speaker is left to grieve without having said goodbye.
De Kok, South African, born 1951; 1988. Elegy in free verse; present at the coffin and memories of the past; refrain of the title line, which later shifts; repetition of hiding; barriers; grief mixed with hurt.
- Context
- The circumstances in which a text was written and set, such as historical events, social attitudes and the writer's life (AO3 in the GCSE, AO4 in the International GCSE).
- Form
- The type and shape of a text: for example sonnet, ballad, free verse, tragedy, comedy, novel or play.
- Speaker
- The voice of a poem. The speaker is not always the poet.
- Free verse
- Poetry without a regular rhyme scheme or metre.
- Refrain
- A line or phrase repeated at intervals through a poem or song.
- Imagery
- Language that creates a picture or appeals to the senses, including similes, metaphors and personification.
All GCSE and International GCSE English Literature key terms and definitions →
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Last updated 2 October 2026. Spotted a mistake? Tell us and we will fix it.