Before You Were Mine

poet

Carol Ann Duffy

theme

loss, betrayal, desire, nostalgia, change

context

Speaker imagines her mother as a teenager, having possibly seen a photo of her at that age. In duffy’s collection she dramatises scenes from childhood to adulthood finding grace in memory amid the complexities of life

I'm ten years away from the corner you laugh on​

• present tense → though about the past (similar to Walking Away) vividly imagined possibly a pic

• first image of mother is of her laughing she is youthful, happy and enjoying her life ten years before her daughter was born. ​

holding​

each other, or your knees, and shriek at the pavement

• image of giddy exuberance →  she’s really enjoying herself, lost in the moment.

• visual and auditory imagery →  creates a vivid picture of her mother’s youthful vivacity (‘the quality of being attractively lively and animated’).

• assonance → as the 'ee' sound is repeated in each, knees and shriek, imitating the actual sound of laughter (hee, hee) → the picture of happiness and youth

fizzy, movie tomorrows

• adjective ‘fizzy’ → champagne & glamour though it doesn’t last long like the mother’s youth

• movie → romance & drama

• the promise of youth you can be anyone and anything, she is young and has her whole life ahead of her

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

• rhetorical question (uncertainty)→ speaker feels that her mother lost something by having the child – her life was better before she was a mother

• possible sense of guilt ‘eh’ → seeks confirmation from mother hopes that isn’t the case but deep down knows its true

and now your ghost clatters towards me

• visual & auditory imagery

• onomatopoeia ‘clatters’ → high heeled shoes on the pavement as the past invades the present through mother’s metaphorical ghost (mother's adolescence have been made to feel so real that she can physically hear them)

• a memory, as if the speaker is now haunted by her mother’s past self

Cha cha cha! … on the way home from mass

Juxtaposition → mother teaching the daughter Latin dance steps on the way home from Catholic Mass on a Sunday reflects the two sides of the mother – both her youthful exuberance and her more sober, severe parenting.​

I wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello

past tense verb ‘wanted’ →  note of regret  – that even as a child she wished she’d known her mother when she was young, with all her sparkle and laughter.

sparkle and waltz and laugh before you were mine.​

Polysyndeton and the rule of three → to summarise her mother as she once was: “sparkle” (glamour),“waltz” (sociable) and “laugh” (fun, happy).

Final repetition of this key, possessive idea, placed at the end of the poem for added importance.