12.1.2

Themes

Test yourself

Love and Fond Memories

The speaker emphasises her love for her city throughout the poem. This ties into the wider themes of memory and place and nostalgia. Rumens uses these techniques to emphasise the speakers' love of her city:

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Repeated possessive pronouns

  • Frequent use of possessive pronouns (e.g. “my city”) conveys the speaker’s deep admiration for, and pride in, her city.
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Metaphor

  • “The worst news I receive of it cannot break / My original view, the bright filled paperweight”.
  • This metaphor suggests the strength and solidity of the speaker’s positive memories.
  • Enjambment (sentences flowing over the end of lines) also highlights their strength, as the sentence breaks through the first line.
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Light and colour imagery

  • Light and colour imagery throughout the poem emphasises the speaker's overwhelmingly positive memories of the city.
  • Examples include:
    • “my memory of it is sunlight-clear…”.
    • ”the white streets…”.
    • “I shall have every coloured molecule of it…”.
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Personification (city)

  • “I comb its hair and love its shining eyes”.
  • This is personification of the city and an intimate, tender image.
  • This intensifies the sense of the speaker’s love and affection towards the city.

Mystery and Identity

The city and the speaker's relationship with the city is quite mysterious. The city is never named. Here are some possible explanations for the mystery:

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Symbolism - no name

  • The city is never named.
  • This perhaps suggests that Rumens wants many people to find relevance in her writing.
  • She could be writing on behalf of all people who have been forced to flee their homes and settle somewhere else.
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Exile?

  • There is a sense of mystery when the speaker describes her city and the reader gets the impression she is an exile of some sort. Examples of mysterious phrases include:
    • “There was once a city...I left it as a child”.
    • “Frontiers rise between us”.
    • “I have no passport, there’s no way back at all”.
    • “They accuse me….”

Memory vs Reality

Rumens draws a contrast between the speaker's positive memories of their former home and their negative impressions of the city now. These are the techniques she uses to draw this contrast:

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Positive vs negative images

  • There is contrasting language throughout the poem.
  • Positive, bright images associated with the speaker’s memories of her homeland are juxtaposed (placed together for emphasis) with harsher, negative images of its current, war-torn state.
  • This emphasises the strength of her memories that overpower the far more negative reality.
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Irony

  • Even though the speaker remembers her city fondly, she seems at odds with the people currently controlling the city.
  • There is a certain irony in that “they” see it as “their free city” but the language she uses (e.g. “sick with tyrants”) suggests restriction and oppression.
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Repetition and change of tone

  • Repetition of “they” in the last stanza is significant.
  • The poem takes on a more threatening, menacing tone.
  • The speaker seems to feel distant from those who now control her city.

Jump to other topics

1Ozymandias - Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

2London - William Blake (1757-1827)

3Storm on the Island - Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

4Exposure - Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

5War Photographer - Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955)

6My Last Duchess - Robert Browning (1812-1889)

7The Prelude - William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

8Charge of the Light Brigade - Alfred Tennyson

9Bayonet Charge - Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

10Poppies - Jane Weir (Born 1963)

11Tissue - Imtiaz Dharker (Born 1954)

12The Emigree - Carol Rumens (Born 1944)

13Kamikaze - Beatrice Garland (Born 1938)

14Checking Out Me History - John Agard (Born 1949)

15Remains - Simon Armitage (Born 1963)

16Grade 9 - Themes & Comparisons

16.1Grade 9 - Themes & Comparisons

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