The language and vocabulary is simple, which suggests that she wants a simple and uncomplicated love. The simple vocabulary seems to be true to most of Duffy’s poems, although they are always descriptive. This is true of ‘Before you were mine’ and ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class.’
In the second stanza of ‘Valentine’ the tone changes quite abruptly. The penultimate stanza has just been telling of the nicer things related with love, promising ‘light.’ However, the second stanza goes on to the ‘tears’ that love will bring and how these ‘tears’ and this love will distort your view of the world: ‘It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief.’ From this point on the poem becomes somewhat melancholy, and to a certain extent ominous. The tone change seems to be a trademark of Duffy. In all of her poems that I have studied, the unanticipated tone change always seems to always be there.
Duffy brings a new element into the poem: fear. This love will be ‘possessive’, you must beware of what love brings, it can be ‘lethal. Here she means that the love being offered is strong, so strong that it could almost kill you. Honest love is possibly ‘lethal’, misleading, ‘it promises light’ and ‘blinds you with tears’ all at the same time. This is a warning that love is serious and should be handled with care.
Carol Ann Duffy remains truthful throughout the poem and she is obviously not a naïve person. At one point in the poem she says that the ‘fierce kiss will stay on your lips…. For as long as we are.’ This indicates that Duffy knows people do not always stay together forever as it says in the wedding vows. She is realistic and speaks the truth: ‘I am trying to be truthful.’ This line reinforces that her poem –her thoughts on love- is aiming to steer clear from traditional views of love: ‘Not a cute card or a kissogram.’
Some phrases in the poem are quite ambiguous, for example, ‘Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips.’ This underlines the harshness of the onion taste ‘on your lips’ whilst also introducing caution. It suggests that the fierce kiss will remain always; even once the lovers have parted the memory will remain ‘for as long as we are.’ The ‘fierce kiss’ also represents the emotions felt during the relationship.
Duffy uses simple vocabulary throughout the poem. But entwined into this vocabulary are many linguistic devices (all of Duffy’s poems are full of linguistic devices to bring them to life). It is this that gives the poem character and ingenuity. The main feature of the poem is the onion, the extended metaphor that Carol Ann Duffy uses to symbolise love. Everything else in the poem is incorporated into the idea that love is ‘an onion’. ‘It will blind you with tears.’ ‘Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring.’ This sentence actually includes both the literal and metaphorical meaning. The ‘ring’ is both in the onion and wedding sense.
‘Platinum’ is a much plainer metal than gold, but is more valuable, and as always in the poem it is a lot more valuable to the receiver.
However, this onion will only become a wedding ring ‘if you like. ‘This time you have a choice. Duffy cannot think that marriage is an essential part of love, or she would have thrust this upon us too (‘Take it’). Perhaps she feels that marriage is related more to the materialistic side of love, rather than the honest, strong kind. Like ‘a cute card or a kissogram,’ it is not crucial to a healthy relationship.
Duffy also uses similes (‘Like the careful undressing of love’), personification (‘Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips’) and alliteration (Its fierce kiss’). All of these techniques help build up a perfect image of what Duffy believes love to be.
One thing that Duffy does not use is sensory imagery. The reason being that ‘Valentine’ is about a feeling, not about a place so there is no need this is also true of ‘Before you were mine’ where the poem is about a person and a memory rather than a place). One poem that is enriched with sensory imagery is ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class.’ Sensory imagery creates a clearer picture for the reader, so it is more interesting as you feel personally involved in the poem. Because of the vivid descriptions that Duffy uses we are able to see the classroom ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ (‘glowed like a sweetshop’), hear it (‘xylophone’s nonsense’), smell it (‘scent of a pencil’), feel it (‘travel up the Blue Nile with your finger, tracing the route’) and even taste it (‘the air tasted of electricity’).
‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ is a poem that is different in many ways to ‘Valentine.’ Firstly it is written in the past tense and it is a memory, similar to ‘Before you were mine’. It is also written in regular stanzas.
When reading ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ for the first time you form an immediate impression of the major part of its content. The first two stanzas are obviously a nostalgic look at the past. It is most certainly about growing up, and you can also sense the romantic and sentimental memory that Carol Ann Duffy holds of her old primary school classroom and her kind –if slightly stereotypical- teacher, Mrs Tilscher.
‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ is a memoir of Duffy’s final year at primary school when she was in the class of a teacher called Mrs Tilscher. The year progresses through the four stanzas, commencing with the last day of the summer term in ‘that feverish July.’
Duffy creates a very warm and comfortable picture of this idyllic classroom. In places it is almost like she is seeing the classroom through the eyes of a child: ‘the classroom glowed like a sweet shop.’ Firstly this is obviously something that a child would say. It could only be through a child’s eyes that a classroom could be likened to a sweet shop. And secondly, this is an enchanted description description; it appeals to the senses and creates an image of an extremely exuberant classroom.
Carol Ann Duffy makes it clear that she thought the classroom was ‘better than home’ with her vivid references to the appearance of the classroom: ‘sugar paper. Coloured shapes’ and ‘enthralling books.’
Unexpectedly –as always- in the middle of this susceptible romantic utopia that Duffy has created in these first two stanzas, an element of fear and reality creeps into the classroom in the shape of ‘Brady and Hindley;’ the moors murderers who killed a number of children in the 1960s. Duffy, however uses the typical classroom image of rubbing out a mistake in your work to show how Mrs Tilscher helped the children ‘erase’ their fears: ‘faded like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake.’ Before the reference to ‘Brady and Hindley’ is made there are a lot of shushing sounds to diminish their existence: ‘sweet shop’, ‘sugar paper’, ‘coloured shapes.’ This again is blocking the outside world from the children’s idyll.
The stanza length is interesting in this poem. Unlike ‘Valentine’ (free verse with irregular inconsistent stanza length), ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ has four stanzas, which makes it a blank verse poem. The first two have eight lines, compared to just seven lines for the final two verses. The reason for this being that Carol Ann Duffy presumably wanted to reflect the children’s changing attitudes and developments in the change of stanza length. The final two stanzas, because they are shorter intensify the tension that is created.
The tone in the first two stanzas is naïve and innocent. This is achieved by the affectionate way that Duffy writes about Mrs Tilscher and the classroom. She emphasises all the personal touches that made her special –‘she’d left a good gold star by your name.’ She also, clearly loved the atmosphere in the classroom- or at least in the first two stanzas- and she manages to express this in the linguistic devices she uses: ‘laugh of a bell,’ ‘xylophone’s nonsense.’
In the third stanza the children are surprisingly compared to ‘tadpoles’ and ‘frogs’ in an extended metaphor (like the one that is used throughout ‘Valentine’) that is used to show their rapid growth. ‘Over the Easter term, the inky tadpoles changed…. Three frogs hopped in the playground.’
Duffy remembers graphically when a ‘rough boy’ told her the facts of life. This is supposedly the time when she also began to lose her naivety that she possessed earlier in the school year (first and second stanza). She realises that her parents are not always truthful. It was not a stork that delivered her to her mother’s lap. The discovery causes her to ‘stare at her parents appalled.’
Another revelation that is made in the poem is that Mrs Tilscher will not always be there for you. When broached with the question of ‘how you were born’ she simply ‘smiles then turns away.’ Reproduction does not belong in the comfortable atmosphere of Mrs Tilscher’s classroom. Mrs Tilscher will no longer be thee to protect you from the outside world and she cannot simply erase the atrocities that are going on behind the ‘glowing’ classroom walls.
The tone of the poem changes from safe to threatening between the second and third stanza. The classroom haven is disturbed. The fourth stanza is the most threatening of all and is full of electrical, stormy images. The child’s ‘impatience to be grown’ is expressed by the tempestuous images: ‘the air tasted of electricity. A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot, fractious under the heavy, sexy sky.’ The word ‘sexy’ in this sentence shows again how the children are growing; as is their vocabulary influenced by the outside world and the facts of life that the child was just previously informed of.
The entire poem seems to be a build-up to the complete contrast that is created in the last line: ‘the sky split open into a thunderstorm.’ This contrast is mirrored in ‘Before you were mine’ where the whole poem seems to build up to the climax of the final line.
This metaphorical thunderstorm has been gathering since the beginning of that ‘feverish July.’ The sky splitting open suggests that knowledge and adulthood are a shock to the children. Kind Mrs Tilscher no longer protects ‘you’. ‘You’ are open to the ‘thunderstorm’ of adulthood. It is an experience that we all must pass through.
It is for this reason that Carol Ann Duffy seems to be directly addressing us in the poem. She does this by firstly using the personal pronoun ’you’ when referring to herself. This means that the poem is written in the second person narrative like ‘Valentine.’ The experiences that she relays to us are ones that the majority of people will have been through/ will go through; therefore can relate to. ‘You’ could be the poet or any child at school, the reader can identify with the poem.
Carol Ann Duffy’s ideas and attitudes of her pre-teens are portrayed in this poem. She clearly felt very safe and secure in Mrs Tilscher’s class, which ‘glowed like a sweet shop.’ This experience seems to have stuck in her memory for a number of reasons. She is obviously eternally grateful for the things which she learnt in Mrs Tilscher’s class including grammar (‘commas into exclamation marks’); geography (‘Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswan.’); and sexual knowledge (‘a rough boy told you how you were born.’).
‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ is similar to ‘Valentine’, and at the same time different. Both of them have
‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ is a poem that is based on Carol Ann Duffy’s own life experience. ‘Before you were mine’ is another poem like this. It is a nostalgic recalling of the past; she is reminiscing about certain episodes from her mother’s life before she was actually born: ‘I’m not here yet.’ The poem is about the relationship between Duffy and her mother. She is romanticising about her mother’s teenage life and the dreams that she once had.
The first two stanzas of the poem are very light and carefree. Duffy’s mother seems to be in the prime of her life: ‘I knew you would dance like that.’ The references to the mother are very happy and bright, ‘laugh’, ‘shriek’. She likens her mother to ‘Marilyn’ Monroe. Marilyn Monroe came to a tragic end. Perhaps this is an early hint that things were not always going to be like this. This shows that Duffy thought her mother lead a very glamorous life and longs to see her mother as she once was, ‘the bold girl winking in Portobello, somewhere in Scotland, before I was born.’
Stanza one is depicting her mother’s life when she was just a young girl with her friends, ‘Maggie McGeeney and Jean Duff’ on a street ‘corner’. Duffy must have been told about these encounters and how her mother and her friends skirts blew up in the breeze (‘polka-dot dress blows round your legs) like the famous photograph of ‘Marilyn’ Monroe.
The second stanza tells of the mother’s teenage dreams of the ‘fizzy movie tomorrows’ and meeting boyfriends ‘under the tree’, coming home late with ‘small bites’ on her neck and facing her mother’s beatings if she arrived home late.
This shows that Duffy recognises that all mothers have mothers – her mothers mother used to ‘stand at the close with a hiding for the late one.’ Conceivably history repeated itself and Duffy’s own mother carried out the same ‘hiding’ propriety.
The ‘high-heeled red shoes’ appear to be all that remains of the glamorous mother who danced ‘in the ballroom with the thousand eyes.’ These shoes are ‘relics’ of that exciting time in the memory of Carol Ann Duffy. She must have thought of them as religious, saintly objects because ’relic’ actually means: “a part of a deceased holy person’s body or belongings kept as an object of reverence” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary), proving that she loved her mother very much.
Throughout the light heartedness of the poem, there is a constant echo of Duffy’s imminent appearance. Duffy is possessive of her mother in the poem. She consistently makes her presence known, even before she was a presence (‘I’m not here yet’). The word ‘mine’ appears in the title and then concludes the poem. It is actually placed on a line by itself to remind us one last time of Duffy’s possessiveness. Perhaps she is trying to lock her mother in this firm embrace of words. Duffy feels guilty that she came along and apparently ruined her mother’s life, but she also wishes to be more special to her mother than the ‘fizzy’ life that she once led. This actually brings in an underlying theme of jealousy. I think that Duffy tried to be more important to her mother than the memories that her mother held of the past.
Duffy assumes that her mother’s life was better before her own ‘possessive yell’ could be heard. She longs to see her mother as she once was, before she was tied down with motherhood. Phrases like ‘I’m ten years away’ and ‘the thought of me doesn’t occur ‘ give the impression of a veiled threat. She is warning her mother that things will not always be like this, the arrival of a child will put a stop to the waltzing and laughing, the glamorous life that she lived and loved.
The poem is actually almost a love poem between Duffy and her mother because it is so affectionate and personal, overflowing with feelings and emotions. She is reaching out to her mother through the poem and re-examining her own feelings as a daughter. Because it is a love poem it is similar to ‘Valentine’ and ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’. Each one is a different kind of love, but ‘Before you were mine’ shows that love can also be a duty, a burden, not just a pleasure: ‘loud possessive yell’.
The poem is a series of reflections by a child on what her mother was like before she was born. It is separated into three different time frames: her mother as a teenager (‘you sparkle and waltz and laugh’), her mother with a daughter (‘You’d teach me the steps on the way home from Mass’) and when Duffy’s mother has passed away (‘Your ghost clatters towards me’).
There are three time periods and two voices: the poet and her mother. The mother must have told her daughter of her childhood past: the dancing and the laughing. Duffy has built up a picture of a glamorous life full of excitement, similar to that of ‘Marilyn’ Monroe.
It is written to sound like Duffy is actually talking to her mother; therefore follows the patterns of everyday speech: ‘The decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one, eh?’ The use of ‘my’, ‘I’ and ‘me’ reinstates Duffy’s presence.
The poem takes on a regular format. Similar to ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ all of the stanzas are consistent in length: five lines. The regularity is again for a purpose (like ‘Valentine’ and ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’), it helps you to realise that time is passing (keeps reminding us that ‘ten years’ after the photo was taken the ‘bold girl winking in Portobello’ was a mother) and the changes from one time period to another. It may also be to help us to visualise photos set out regularly over a page, like in a photo album, as it is a photo of Duffy’s mother that inspired the poem.
Carol Ann Duffy is acknowledged for presenting us with the unexpected and ‘Before you were mine’ is no exception.
Typically it is the mother that is possessive and protective of the daughter. But in this poem the characters have reversed roles. Duffy perhaps wishes that she could have led the life that her mother led: another indicator of the jealousy issue.
Towards the end of the poem, the poet actually materialises and is a physical part of it. She sees her mother as a ‘ghost’ whenever she visits places that her mother knew.
‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’, Duffy writes about how she is thankful for what she learnt in her final year of primary school: ‘commas into exclamation marks’, ‘Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.’
Duffy again shows her gratitude in ‘Before you were mine’, this time to her mother. She is grateful for the way that her mother made her childhood exciting: ‘You’d teach me the steps on the way home from mass.’ This activity is stated to be happening on the ‘wrong pavement’. This is possibly a hint that the mother regrets the loss of her exciting, dancing youth now that she has a ‘possessive’ daughter who has to be taken to mass.
I think that ‘Before you were mine’ and ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ are quite similar. They are both about a memory (a school classroom and a mother’s life). They both have a regular layout, with varying sentence lengths. This regularity isn’t emulated in ‘Valentine’ though. I think that the reason for this is that ‘Valentine’ is about a feeling (love) and the other two are about actual places and people.
The language used in ‘Before you were mine’ is very detailed and allows us to create a clear picture of the mother’s early encounters. Duffy uses a lot of positive words to bring the poem to life: ‘sparkle’, ‘waltz’, and ‘laugh’. These words make a contrast to the final words: ‘before you were mine.’ Here we are reminded for the last time that the mother’s life did not always ‘sparkle’. With the arrival of a ‘possessive yell’ she became tied down. ‘Maggie Mcgeeney and Jean Duff’ were never heard of again.
In ‘Valentine’ Duffy used a lot of ambiguities (‘fierce kiss’). The same can be said for ‘Before you were mine’. ‘In the ballroom with the thousand eyes.’ This sets a very romantic scene and could be referring to the eyes of five hundred potential suitors watching the mother-to-be dancing ‘in those red high-heeled shoes.’ Or it could be an innuendo to a glitter ball. This illustrates how light played on the ball, sending light across the dance floor in a ‘thousand eyes.’
When reading Carol Ann Duffy’s poems it is advisable to be prepared for the unexpected, as this is almost certainly what you will get.