Critical Analysis of "Before You Were Mine" by Carol Ann Duffy.

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Critical Analysis of “Before You Were Mine” by Carol Ann Duffy

        This poem is a series of reflections by a child on what her mother was like before she was born. The poet is writing to her mother, maybe possibly having seen a photo of her as a teenager.

 The voice is the first person; “I” and “You” tell us this, and also the poem is written to sound as if the person being addressed is the child’s mother. Another thing to note is that the poet wants to state that she’s present, even before she was present, “I’m ten years away” and “I knew you would dance like that” tells us exactly this.

The poet describes the photo of her mother standing up laughing with two of her friends. She knows that the thought of having a child when young ‘doesn’t occur’ to her mother, when she was wrapped up in a world of dances and teenage dreams. Now remembering her own childhood, the poet thinks of how she used to play with her mother’s red shoes and imagines when her mother might have worn them to meet a boyfriend in ‘George Square’, “I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics,

and now your ghost clatters toward me over George Square”.

The poet also remembers how her mother used to teach her dance steps when she was a child – yet even back then, the poet wished she could have known her mother when still young.

 The poem doesn’t give any clues to the sex of the child, but when first read, the first impressions are that of a girl, as the poet is a female, and has written in the first-person. The ideas I think the poem could be about are that the mother could be near death, and the child is thinking back to his/her childhood memories. Another theory is that maybe the child is looking back at their mother’s photo of when she was younger. This could explain the last verse.

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The whole entire poem looks back on the poet’s (the child’s) life, “before I was born”. The first incident she relates to took place ten years before her own birth, “I’m ten years away from the corner…” The events in the mother’s life that interest the poet, Carol Ann Duffy, are those of love when young. The memories recounted in the poem are those of the mother and would have been told to the child at various points in her life.

The poem is written in four equal stanzas of five lines each. This helps us to visualize ...

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