'To My Nine-Year-Old-Self' - Helen Dunmore

“You must forgive me”

immediate + direct demanding apology

simple sentence

“Don’t look so surprised, / perplexed, and eager to be gone”

childhood agitation → tricolon of excitement

“balancing your hands or on the tightrope”

ephemerality + balance → caught in limbo

“You would rather run than walk, rather climb than run / rather leap from a height than anything”

anaphoric asyndeton → creates an ‘avalanche’ effect → franticness + eagerness → fearless + flight?

“I have spoiled this body we once shared. / Look at the scars, and watch the way I move”

Corruption of age → Rousseau?

“Look” - observation + female body?

damage + decay? ‘spoiled’ feels impure → almost food like?

“careful of a bad back or a bruised foot”

plosives adds weight to the body → heavy and inescapable physicality now gone?

“Do you remember how, three minutes after waking / we’d jump straight out”

personal pronoun “we” indicates a difference between present and past selves → postmodern fracturing + separation of identity?!

“We’d jump straight out of the ground floor window / into the summer morning?”

descent into impurity? symbolic transition? now frozen into indecisive stasis…?

fearlessness

“That dream we had, no doubt it’s as fresh in your mind / as the white paper to write it on”

blank slate → tabula rasa

invites inspirate

past tense of dreams → now dissolved

“we made a start, but something else came up - / a baby vole, or a bag of sherbet lemons - and beside,…”

the list is sepatated from the rest by dashes → distance between memory + lamenting her failed ambitions? infantile imagery?

plosives → physicality? “

“that summer of ambition / created an ice-lolly factory, a wasp trap / and a den by the cesspit”

Icarian imagery? flying too close to the sun → lollies melt + are ephemeral?

wasp trap → lack of safety?!

rose-tinted glasses!

“I’d like to say that we could be friends / but the truth is we have nothing in common”

bulky + unpunctutated → awkward

completely Postmodern separation of identity → fracturing!

“I won’t keep you then. / Time to pick rosehips for tuppence a pound,”

Rosehips = take a hundred days to mature → it’s time for a slow descent into maturation?

tuppence = language of its time → this is a poem about the past !!

“time to hide down scared lanes”

anaphoric asyndeton of “time” → lamenting the passing + warping of time and its effects

“scared lanes” - personifies the setting of the lines, amplifiying the speaker’s fear so that it pervades into the world around her

“from men in cars after girl-children”

neologism → creates a new word for that liminality between girlishness and womanhood → designated space of time

“men in cars” - automation, compared to the natural world of before!

“or to lunge out over the water / on a rope that swings from that tree”

natural world v automation of “men in cars”

“lunge out” → girl caught in stasis → in limbi

enjambment embodies this static limbo!

neither here nor there → And if there were movement, it would be constatntly back and forth…!

“that tree” = specificity to the tree = plucked straight from the speaker’s memories

“long buried in housing”

laments modern development?

buried = both claustrophobic OR to do with death → burial of a carefree + nature-filled past?

“I shan’t cloud your morning”

speaker allows the girl to maintain innocence for a little longer - protectiveness, even though they aren’t “friends” → metaphorical pathetic fallacy ?!

“

“God knows I have fears enough for us both”

only unifier is that they are girls, who ought to be scared…?!

separated by em-dashes?! pauses → hesitant to taint the childhood

semantic field of destruction

“I leave you in an ecstasy of concentration”

Ecstasy = Romantic euphemism for sex → Shelley’s Epipsychidion → tries to censor the little girl from adult sexuality

“slowly peeling a ripe scab from your knee to taste it on your tongue”

leaves them in the present tense → in sensualness

ripe scab → child approaching their ripening too?

ecstasy - short-lasting?