Before you were mine

Context

• Carol Ann Duffy born in 1955 she is a Scottish author and poet

• Written and published in 1993 in collection of poems “Mean Time”

• Duffy revealed that the poem is 'entirely autobiographical', in the sense that it incorporates her own musings about the life of her mother before she was born.

• The poem came about because Duffy looked back at old pictures of her mum when she was young and carefree, coupled with stories from her mother glamourizing her youth

Context with her mum

• Her mother had grown up in Glasgow, becoming a teenager during the 1950s.

• When the post WW2 generation became teenagers in the 1950s, they rejected the previous rigid restrictions of their parents and their parents values

• In Before You Were Mine, Carol Ann Duffy, represents her spirited mother, subtly exploring the relationships and conflicts of the time.

Form

• Eulogy

• The poem is written in four equal stanzas of five lines each

• Five lines= quintain

• This could affect both the rigidity and restraint of the post-war life into which the speaker's mother was born

• It may also represent the regularity of time passing

• However, the rhyme scheme is irregular, perhaps demonstrating her mother's tendency to break free of shackles

Structure

• Structured in blank verse which creates an underlying sense of disharmony - mother's life wasn't as she had hoped. Fragments of memories and imagined memories pieced together like tableaus or vignettes, so contains mixture of enjambment and caesura

• Has regularity in the stanzas to represent the regularity of the circle of life - daughter, mother, grandmother.

• It also often uses the present tense to talk about the past - again suggesting that things repeat themselves.

• Circular/cyclical structure also shown in the first pavement and the poem ending with a pavement, but the 'wrong' one

• Narrative Structure - The poem is roughly structured in chronological order, with events and ideas detailed in the order in which they occurred

• Stanza 1 deals with her mother's teenage years, stanza 2 her carefree life on nights out and in ballrooms, stanza 3 shortly after the birth of the speaker, and stanza 4 during the speaker's childhood.

I’m ten years away

Temporal deixis

I’m not here yet.

Caesura

The thought of me doesn’t occur

in the bathroom with the thousand eyes

Mother is far too busy declaring herself

thousand eyes hyperbole to show the mothers beauty but also the idea of others being judgemental perhaps referencing the prevailing attitudes of the time

the fizzy, movie tomorrows

Onomatopoeic shows excitement

The decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one, eh

• Having conversation tone

• Rhetorical

• Sacarcastic

• Very possesiive

• she’s forcing mum to agreee with her

I remember my hands on those high-heeled red shoes, relics.

• The child is dominating the shoes of the mum used to dance in

• Hand imagery

• Controlling

• Red shoes promiscuous the babby is taking away the promiscuity of the mum

and now your ghost flatters toward me over George Square

Sound of mother walking youth is death or happiness

Even then

I wanted the bold girl winking in portobello

She challenging stereotypes at the time of 1950s

That glamourous life lasts

Consonantal Alliteration