The first point about the poem is the title, Passed On. This has a few different meanings the first of which is to do with the death of the mother of the poet, Carole Satymurti. This ties in with the main theme of the poem. The second meaning of the title is the handing down of the box from the mother to the daughter. The mother has passed on her knowledge to her daughter. The third meaning is that the daughter has got passed the reliance on the box of index cards that her mother left her. She gets over using them for everything, which cumulates in her burning the cards in the last stanza. The final meaning is that she may pass on the diaries, which she is now keeping, to her children.

The first stanza starts with a line that is quite misleading, "this box contained my mother". This first leads you to think she is talking about a coffin but the next line makes it clear that it is a box of index cards. She refers to her mother being squirrel like when she wrote the cards and to her "providing for a string of hard winters". The mother knows that she is going to die and she is trying to provide for the hard times ahead for her daughter, just like a squirrel would collect nuts for t

In the fourth stanza Satymurti starts to realise that the cards as good as they once seemed. She starts to discover that some of them are blank and that some of them are wrong. She says they have become "mute" linking in with the image that she could hear the cards talk. She starts to add her own notes. This is the development of herself, a move away from being her mother. She then writes a bit in italics that are supposed to be like the original entries made by her mother. The outtake is slightly strange. It doesn't have any grammatical structure and doesn't actually make sense. The poet uses enjambment to make the section flow, the complete opposite to the style in which the mother wrote her entries on the cards. When you look at it closely you can see what the poet was trying to infer. She uses words such as love, lust politics, trust and she uses phrases such as "never telling". I think she is trying to infer that some things in life cannot come down to a set of rules or g!

The whole poem is a sort of circle. She begins the poem with the word "Before". This could mean before the death of her mother but it more likely means before she got rid of the cards. This is more likely because the sentence

Some common words found in the essay are:
Carole Satymurti, Bruce Passed, mother poet, hard winters, string hard winters, trying infer, box contained mother, box index cards, index cards, cards mother, daughter relying, mother passed, box contained, box index, cards stanza,
Approximate Word count = 814
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)