Carol Ann Duffy uses the theme of growing up in her poem 'In Mrs Tilscher's Class'. She starts off by setting the first stanza in a class in a primary school. She uses 'you could travel up the Blue Nile with your finger

Moving on to the next stanza, Carol Ann Duffy has started with ‘Over the Easter term, the inky tadpoles changed from commas into exclamation marks’. This is definitely a signal from the poet that the children are growing up. The poet here has put the poem into reality going back to when the reader was at this stage, everyone had the tadpoles experience before Easter then come back and they’d all turned into frogs but here the poet is putting the children in conjunction with the tadpoles signifying that they are growing up as well. As you can see Carol Ann Duffy, the poet, adds something in this stanza that almost everybody has the experience of as a youngster, ‘A rough boy told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared at your parents, appalled, when you got back home’. It was that day never to be forgotten, the day you found out that you don’t just pop out your mums belly button but everybody, eventually, takes in the truth and carries on with their lives.

The next stanza begins. By now the children aren’t really, in fact, children anymore. They’ve finally reached the final curtain before senior school. They were in their last term of primary school and what fools they were to believe that this was a relief. ‘That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity. A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot, fractious under the heavy, sexy sky’. Here, the poet is just emphasising the summer season and hot weather and I think with the use of the word electricity she means how immensely excited they were about leaving. ‘You asked her how you were born and Mrs Tilscher smiled, then turned away’. Again referring back to the, once disgusting but now quite interesting, subject of sex, here showing that their minds still don’t really want to believe it but aren’t perfectly sure what’s true and what isn’t. ‘Mrs Tilscher smiled, then turned away’. Here again emphasising that sex isn’t to be found out about at this age and certainly isn’t a subject of conversation for the classroom. ‘Reports were handed out. You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown, as the sky splits into a thunderstorm. It must be the last day; the children are extremely excited about leaving. First of all, at the end of the day, you get your report and without even saying your last goodbyes you’ve ran through the gates, but these may not be the gates of your school but the gates to a bumpy ride to hell! ‘Impatient to be grown’ after all the children or should I say young adults have hit the puberty barrier and now want to be just like their mother and father, no longer embarrassed about sex but wanting to be involved with it. ‘As the sky split open into a thunderstorm’ this is a very powerful use of language, it almost hits the reader. But Carol Ann Duffy is basically showing the reader that they don’t know what they’re in for and could turn out to be horrendous. The use of the word thunderstorm maybe referring back to the weather because usually after really hot days after days you get a thunderstorm and also could be referring back to the unsafe world looking back at Child murderers Brady and Hindley.