In the second verse we find out that Mary’s family had eventually moved to a house with a cheaper rent. ‘The same houses, different homes’ this connotes that they were brought up by different families as house is the outer meaning and home is what is going on inside, and this is also foreshadowing that although they look very equal they are going to be different in the future. So they lived in the same type of houses but different families, economic conditions and social backgrounds. In the fourth stanza, competition ends, the writer is disappointed, and the rhyming makes this disappointment more flowy and effective. There is a contrast between ‘a cheaper rent’ and ‘elegant greyhounds by his side’ because greyhounds were used for racing and betting, and it is extraordinary for a man who moves for a cheaper rent to another house to be playing betting. So this shows that his dogs were even more elegant than him, and that he is really sexiest and selfish as he ‘didn’t believe in high school education, especially for girls’.
So as their parents had different notions about money and education, resulting in a separation from each other and finally, fairly different lives.
The writer turns to the past tense to emphasize that it has been a lot and things have quite changed, as she says ‘I am coming from the library – sitting near to me on the bus, Mary’ The writer creates a sense of suspense in a very effective way here, as she uses commas and dashes there are pauses and the pace slows down. So we start wondering who was in sitting next to her. The importance of the use of the dash in this quote is to pause and make the reader realize the importance. Mary’s husband ‘has eyes for no one else but Mary.’ this is something that all girls would want and it suggests that he loves her greatly, and as her ‘arms are round the full-shaped vase’ this illustrates that she was pregnant. From the description of the poet, we can obviously understand, ‘Oh, you can see where the attraction lies, in Mary’s life’ or ‘not that I envy her – really’ that she is jealous of her and although she thought that Mary would have a very bad life indeed Mary is also pregnant as ‘her arms are round the full shaped vase.’ so she tries to convince herself that she was not jealous and would not like to have her life. The poet makes contrast with the word ‘full’ as Mary’s hand surrounded her embryo and the poet’s hands are ‘full’ of books, emphasizing and portraying the difference between them because of the choices made for them.
The poetic voice is Liz Lochhead who is also the poet of this poem ‘The Choosing’. The mood seems melancholic and bitter as these two ‘equal’ girls had to separate from each other and had totally different lives. The tone is firstly joyful and then it becomes sad when they had to separate and at first that had a really joint and joyful childhood.
There is no regular rhyme in the poem, and no rhyming couplets, it doesn’t have a regular beat and the beat changes to emphasize some sentences. It has an irregular pattern; it is a free-verse poem.
It has an irregular form and there is no regular sentence length. The writer uses lots of techniques such as enjambement ‘with a husband who is tall, curly haired, had eyes for no one else but Mary’ emphasizing that they had a close relationship and this run-on-lines quickens the pace. We have an example of metaphor where it says ‘her arms round the full-shaped vase.’ to make the reader understand that she was pregnant. There is also alliteration where it says ‘copies of Collins’ Children’s Classics’ and also sibilance where it says ‘small school’s small class’ to emphasize with the word ‘small’ that the competition was too big. We have contrast such as ‘The same houses, different homes’ to show that they were living in the same type of houses but they had different economic conditions and social context.
So as a conclusion I can say that both girls were clever, but only one was allowed to stay on at school and those lives weren’t really chosen by themselves. The persona would remain in her little scholastic world and still envy Mary for her life, because it was much more than just a marriage, they loved each other so much. I really enjoyed the poem ‘The Choosing’ because it is so realistic and show us that the choices they made, caused them to be separate now and they weren’t actually made by them, so Mary understands how insignificant ‘their’ choices were, making their relationship end.
