“She kept an antique shop – or it kept her”
Both owner and shop have come to resemble each other, like a lady and her pet, although the language she uses is subtle.
All of verse three is one large metaphor, the references to a ‘long narrow room’ into which the old woman put her most prized possessions, ‘the smell of absences where shadows come’, and the nothingness that can’t be polished ‘to give her own reflection’ are all references to a coffin. The narrow room suggests the shape of it, the smell of absences suggests mourning over her non-presence in the world of the living, and the verse also hints that death is an such an absolute certainty that no amount of polishing will bring back granny.
The basic structure of the poem is almost in iambic pentameter (i.e.; a, b, a, b, c, c). There are also many words in the poem that would be considered negative, such as: refused, never said, hurt, guilt, refusal, frail, narrow, too long, can’t be polished, no grief, never used, and no finger-marks. Put together, all of these words form a basic idea of negativity within the reader’s subconscious. Feelings of regret, guilt, despair and grief waver on the edge of thought.
The poem by Duffy, ‘In Mrs. Tilscher’s Class’, is a direct contrast of this, delivering scenes of happiness and learning, of new experiences. The first word of the whole poem, ‘You’, is very important. It suggests being personal, as if the poem is almost casual in it’s language. This idea keeps up throughout the writing. The order of events and topics throughout the poem tilt towards spontaneity, being slightly random in the way the memories are dictated, and phrases are used as a supplement for sentences, which might be as the lingual equivalent of snapshots, or pastings from times past. Description is also important in portraying happiness in an educational environment:
“Enthralling books.
The classroom glowed like a sweetshop.
Sugar paper. Coloured shapes…
The scent of a pencil slowly, carefully shaved.”
The last verse about the pencil uses punctuation to highlight it’s meaning, the part of commas suppresses the reader to take his time reading it, with the same deliberation that a child may take in sharpening the pencil. The poem appears to make a transition as it moves on, both in language and in content. The language becomes more sophisticated as it advances such as a child learning more ‘big words’ (e.g. ‘that for an hour, then a skittle of milk’ transcends to ‘fractions under a heavy, sexy sky’). The content also changes from childhood innocence (‘Some mornings, you found she’d left a gold star by your name’) to sexual awareness (see heavy, sexy sky comment, also ‘you ran through the gates, impatient to be grown, as the sky split open into a thunderstorm’). The safety disappears as the child finds himself in the real world, but is still happy and ‘impatient to be grown’. Mrs Tilscher’s refusal to respond (‘turned away’) to an innocent question about how a child is made hints that an answer might burst the protective bubble she has helped maintain. The beginning of verse three also helps to see how language is used in the idea of children to adults, where ‘the inky tadpoles changed from commas into exclamation marks’, the commas looking like tadpoles and the exclamation marks representing the world of puberty; of raging hormones and extreme stress.
Brady and Hindley, the child-killers, did not fit in with the children’s innocence, and so ‘faded like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake’. In conclusion to this poem’s analysis, I think that the punctuation and metaphors of such help to envision a perfect child-like world, and the joy is easily felt through the page to the reader thanks to the appropriate use of adjectives that Duffy portrays in her writing; a vast contrast to the morbid tones and text like that of Elizabeth Jennings.
An important similarity that exists within both the poems is the child-like use of certain adjectives; how an adult concept (such as running a shop, or sexual awareness) is viewed, and sometimes mistranslated through the eyes of a child. Two prominent examples of this are found in both poems. In “My Grandmother”, the last few lines convey a message of slight puzzlement:
“I walked into her room among the tall
Sideboards and cupboards – things she never used
But needed: and no finger-marks were there,
Only the new dust falling through the air.”
It is as if we can understand the writer’s thoughts and queries at that time; why did she keep all this furniture and use none of it? The answer, we know, is that they were the relics of her past experiences, physical incarnations of what her life has meant to her, but a child could not hope to comprehend such a difficult idea.
The second example in “In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” is drawn from the end of the third verse:
“A rough boy
Told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared
At your parents, appalled, when you got back home.”
As an adult (or even as an adolescent), the idea of being disturbed by sex is far from true (except for maybe a few religious types), but to a child, the very idea of such a squishy, messy and disorganised ordeal that is sex is comparable to the concept of mountaineering on Pluto is to a speckled flying fish, i.e. the very idea is absurd, and possibly even disturbing that there is such a vast idea that your parents (I know abandon the comparison of the fish) never told you about, and you have been living in blissful and idiotic ignorance of for the best part of a decade. So, the main similarity between the two poems is attempting to grasp complex ideas through childish fingers.
A significant difference between the two poems is that of choices. In Jennings’ poem, she was given a choice of going out with her grandmother, to which she refused (‘I was afraid’), but in “Mrs Tilscher’s Class”, there is no choice, just an onward plod from the rural village of childhood to the horizon-spanning cityscape of adulthood. It is not a very big difference, but for me, is the most prominent and makes all the difference.
To evaluate, I have analysed my main difference according to language and the quality of the child – adult relationship, and find (drum-roll) “In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” to be the more successful in outlining the two points listed above. Not only does Carol Ann Duffy use language to convey the significance and fragility of a child – adult relationship towards the reader, but is intelligent enough to use punctuation too. Such examples are the quotes about tadpoles, and Brady and Hindley. The references to Mrs Tilscher’s unanswered question, the rough boy and Brady and Hindley convey the sheer magnanimousness of stabilising a child’s belief that the world is a perfect place, and if people like the child murderers exist then the universe is not working probably. It also conveys extra meanings such as growing up and the turbulence of adolescence.
