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English literature on poetry - Essay Example

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Activity 1 “Before you were mine” is a lovely poem by Carol Ann Duffy about a daughter that narrates how her mother’s life must have been ten years before she was born. The first line to begin with seems a little baffling as we read ‘I’m ten years away from the corner you laugh on’, but it gets clear that the storyteller (the daughter) is staring at a snap of her mother with three of her friends…
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As the second stanza begins, the relater strikes a chord that all thoughts of her are still far-flung as the young woman in the photograph goes dancing ‘in the ballroom with the thousand eyes’: it gives the impression as though all the eyes were on her future mother. She envisions how her mother must have danced, and can comprehend that if the right person walked her house, she would have been in a daydream the next day: ‘those fizzy, movie tomorrows’ juggle up the miraculous feeling flawlessly.

The daughter also knows that her grandmother would have been waiting with a thrashing if her mother was behind schedule home, but that this would have been a tiny cost to pay for such a nighttime out. In the third stanza, the daughter passes on to the moment of her birth with the expression ‘my loud, possessive yell’, handing over the thought that this was a crucial, life-changing split second. She becomes conscious that the ten years earlier her birth, as her mother moved toward parenthood, must have been the unsurpassed ones.

She can consider playing with an elderly pair of her mother's ‘high-heeled red shoes, relics,’ and films her mother walking in them, bizarrely referring to her ‘ghost’ as she approaches. Her mind's eye takes on the senses equally on picture and odor as the picture becomes more glowing: ‘till I see you, clear as scent’; she thinks of her mother as ‘darling’, and envisions that she would have had love bites on her neckline. The fourth and final stanza begins with an animated Cha Cha Cha!

in italics, and the daughter girl retains information on how her mother trained her to dance on the way home from cathedral. There is the wisdom of the outlawed here, rumbling the thought of her mother going home late to a penalty conceivably. These dancing coaching seem to have been in practice when the daughter was still a kid, as she says ‘Even then / I wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello’. The final two lines of the poem portray the mother's adobe as enchanting, and in the concluding one, the daughter incarcerates the quintessence of her mother's teenage years where she used to 'sparkle and waltz and laugh', fashioning a picture of a full of life, lighthearted, blithe young woman.

Duffy compares the young woman's dreamy fantasies with the actuality of motherliness, which will come ten years later: “The thought of me doesn't occur/in.The fizzy, movie tomorrows/ the right walk home could bring.’’ hence, making it a very admiring, light-hearted beautiful piece of poetry. Activity 2 The poem is a four-canto one, each stanza comprises of five lines, with a little deviation in measurement lengthwise of line. The first two stanzas highlight solely on the life of the mother before the offspring was born, at the same time the third stanza unlocks with an indication to the daughter's delivery and then shifts to the daughter's mental picture of her mother in her past life, thus connecting a bond with the preceding stanzas.

The fourth stanza starts on with reminiscence from the daughter's younger life with her mom, and then takes us backside once more to the mother's days of passion for dancing. The outward appearance of the poem is predictable: empty verse (unrhymed pentameters) stanzas, all of

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