Answer: personification

The clock is given the human ability to learn and to wait, which is personification.

Answer: enjambment

Enjambment is when a sentence runs past the end of a line or stanza without a pause.

Answer: The poet represents love not as grand gesture but as quiet, repeated sacrifice, using domestic imagery and a controlled structure to show that care is something done rather than said.

Answer: Simile and imagery of departure: 'the dark takes her like a tide takes line'. The mother is pulled away by forces larger than her; the speaker is left holding the slack, suggesting dependence and helplessness.

Answer: Personification of the home: the fridge 'rehearse[s] its hum', the clock 'has learnt to wait'. The house itself seems to wait with the child, stretching time and showing how absence fills a home.

Answer: Structural shift and enjambment in the final stanza: 'The plain / fact is this'. The poem breaks its own pattern to state the realisation directly; 'love is chores, / and shift work' redefines love as labour.

Answer: Together the techniques move from the child's loneliness to understanding: sacrifice is invisible while it happens and only recognised afterwards, in the 'quiet dangers' faced 'at the end of other people's corridors'.

Model answer: In 'Night Shift', love is represented not as something declared but as something endured. Through domestic imagery, personification of the waiting household, and a structural turn in the final stanza, the poet reframes a mother's night work as an act of sacrifice that the child only gradually learns to read. The poem opens with departure: the mother's keys are 'a small bright argument of sound', and 'the dark takes her like a tide takes line'. The simile positions the mother as something pulled away by a force beyond either of them, leaving the speaker holding the slack.