Compare and contrast "Sonnet 29" (by Elizabeth Barret Browning) with "Mother, any distance." Explain how the poets use tone and language to portray the theme of love.

While Simon Armitage's "Mother, any distance" and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's "Sonnet 29" are both certainly love poems, they are concerned with quite different types of love. They also take different approaches to structure and rhyme to convey their ideas, with "Sonnet 29" following a broadly Petrarchan sonnet structure and rhyme scheme, while "Mother, any distance" does not adhere to a rigid structure or rhyme scheme, although there are sporadic and irregular instances of rhyme and pararhyme within it.
In choosing a sonnet, Barrett-Browning makes an explicit decision to cast her poem in a grand tradition of love poetry, encompassing Petrarch and Shakespeare. Sonnets are traditionally about such subjects as love and death; Barrett-Browning lends cohesion to her love poem, not only through its rhyme scheme, but also through the prolonged natural imagery which emphasizes the nature of love as a growing thing.
The poet's thoughts, she says, "twine" and "bud" like vines around the "tree" of her love; later, she describes her lover as "my palm tree" and like "a strong tree." The use of language creates a vidid image of the lover as the strong "presence" around which the poet centers herself; the lovers are so close that she "breathe[s] within [his] shadow," and indeed "I do not think of thee——am too near thee." The two lovers have grown together organically, becoming almost one organism, like a vine growing around a tree. It is the lack of distance between the two that emphasizes the intensity of their love.
By contrast, the maternal-fraternal love described in Armitage's "Mother, any distance" is not characterized by intense physical closeness, but rather by a capacity for "unreeling years" to fall between the two, without its causing their love to weaken. The poet uses the physical event of a son moving into a new house, helped by his mother, to describe metaphorically the assistance a mother lends to her son and the "spool of tape" that connects them. The two of them may grow apart, but they are connected: "Anchor. Kite."
The incident described in this poem represents a "breaking point," suggesting that the son is about to leave his mother's home for the first time: she has lent him, now, all the support she can, having provided "a second pair of hands" for him all his life. It is the mother's love that now allows the son "to fall or fly" in the "endless sky" that is life; the son will always be able to find his way "back to base," but their love does not require physical proximity in order to flourish. Indeed, the touches of unexpected rhyme in this poem surprise and delight the reader with unanticipated moments of cohesion: "still pinch / the last one-hundredth of an inch." Even as the anchor between son and mother makes itself known when it is needed, the rhyme occurs to re-anchor the reader to the rhythm of the poem; the structure does not need to be constantly in evidence in order to provide support, just as the mother does not need to hover around her son continually in order to be "a second pair of hands."