Answer: Enjambment. The sentence does not stop at the line end but 'lets go' and is carried onto the next line, so the form imitates what the coach is asking the mother to do: to trust that she will be held. The break after 'hold' also creates a brief suspense before 'your weight'.

Answer: The full stops and commas break the line into a halting, stop-start rhythm that mirrors the mother's struggle: sinking, surfacing, coughing. 'And now' then hangs at the end of the octave, building anticipation for the turn.

Answer: The octave is built on 'she' and 'her': the speaker watches the mother from the outside. The sestet begins 'I see', turning inward to the speaker's realisation. The poem shifts from describing a swimming lesson to reinterpreting the past: the mother who once reassured the speaker was frightened herself.

Answer: The 'floor' of the pool represents safety and certainty. The speaker realises that courage does not mean having secure footing; it means pushing away from security into the unknown. The metaphor redefines bravery as action taken despite fear, which links the mother's past (being afraid while protecting her child) with her present (letting go of the rail).

Answer: The rhyme pairs the poem's two states. The repeated sound makes the final word feel like an answer to line 11: the fear the speaker has just discovered is overcome in the closing image. The prefix 'un-' marks the change exactly, giving the poem a sense of resolution.

Answer: It suggests determination mixed with anxiety and perhaps embarrassment: she is concentrating hard, a little defensive and hiding her face. Combined with 'she's far too old', it shows she doubts herself but has come anyway ('Still, she's here somehow').

Answer: The first sentence. It claims that the poet uses the Petrarchan sonnet's volta to transform a simple scene into a moment of realisation, reversing the speaker's understanding of the mother.

Answer: (1) It identifies the octave's observation of the mother and the turn at line 9. (2) It discusses the enjambment of 'let water hold / your weight' and the 'afraid' / 'unafraid' rhyme. Discussing form shows the marker how the poem's structure makes meaning, not just its word choices, which is what distinguishes poetry analysis.

Model answer: Through a shift in voice at the volta, the poet presents a relationship in which the child, now an adult, comes to see the parent as vulnerable and brave. In the octave, the speaker's voice is observant and slightly distant, describing the mother through physical details such as 'knuckles white against the morning cold' and a 'frowning brow', images that convey her tension and self-doubt. Her own words, reported indirectly as 'she's far too old', suggest an embarrassment the speaker notices but does not yet understand. The volta at line 9 changes this voice from observer to participant, as 'I see the thing I never saw before' brings the speaker's memory into the poem. The image of the mother who 'held me in the deep' reverses the present scene: once she was the one holding, and now she is the one learning to be held. This reversal deepens the relationship, because the speaker recognises that her past reassurance hid her own fear. The closing image of the mother lying 'back in the water, unafraid' is witnessed with quiet pride, the speaker now the watcher on the edge as the mother once was. The poet therefore presents love between parent and child as something that changes shape over time, revealing that understanding a parent can mean seeing their courage only when roles are reversed.