How Duffy Presents Childhood

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Examine the Ways in Which Carol Ann Duffy Presents Childhood Experiences in her Poetry Carol Ann Duffy’s poems The Good Teacher (TGT), In Mrs Tilscher’s Class (IMTC), Brothers and Before You Were Mine (BYWM) feature childhood in a varied number of ways, but mainly through memories. These memories are a combination of her own and those of other people, all of which she remembers through the use of different stimuli. Para 1 Duffy uses different stimuli to trigger memories of childhood in BYWM, Brothers, TGT and IMTC In all four of the poems, Duffy uses different stimuli to trigger memories of childhood, mainly through images and sounds. Both TGT and BYWM begin with Duffy looking at a photograph of two very different situations, with it being of her mother and her friends having fun in BYWM and a school photo in TGT. However, both images trigger very different emotions from Duffy. BYWM is a very possessive poem, in which Duffy seems to have wanted to be a part of her mother’s life before she was even born, shown in the line ‘Even then I wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello’. She appears to regret the fact that she could not have been around to experience her mother’s childhood with her and be friends with the daring girl that she admires. Duffy also acknowledges that she was a very possessive child, ‘The decade ahead of my loud possessive yell’, but doesn’t see this as a problem, instead believing it to be normal for a child to be controlling of their mother. In TGT, the school photo remind Duffy of how much she hated her teachers at secondary school and why it was that she felt this towards them. The poem begins with Duffy saying, ‘No bigger than your thumbs, those virtuous women size you up from the front row.’ This is to signify that those women who thought they were so intimidating and authoritative are now so small that she could cover them up

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