Themes
English Lit: AQA GCSE Poetry - Love & Relationships, topic 12.1.2
Possession
Duffy suggests throughout Before You Were Mine that there is something possessive about a child's love for their mother.
Possessive language
- The poet uses possessive language to describe her mother, imaging that she belonged to her even before she was born – ‘Even then I wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello.’
- Even the line used as the title, 'before you were mine' suggests irritation at a life before she existed.
- It shows the narrator's desire to possess her mother entirely.
Burden of motherhood
- The poet presents motherhood as a burden. She describes her cries as ‘possessive’ because they take her mother's attention away from her past life.
The Past
Duffy uses several techniques to create a vivid memory of her mother's past, as imagined by her, in Before You Were Mine.
Excitement
- The narrator describes her mother with exciting and glamorous language. For example:
- ‘sparkle and waltz’.
- ‘stamping stars’.
- ‘high-heeled red shoes’.
- ‘Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn’.
- There is also a lot of vivid, sensory imagery – which helps to bring these memories to life. For example:
- ‘clear as scent’.
- ‘shriek’ and ‘clatters’.
Narrator's creation
- There is a sense of artifice (deception) in the poem - Duffy is imagining her mother’s life before she was born as if she had seen it.
- ‘I knew you would dance like that’ – implies that Duffy is somehow transported in time to see her mother as she was.
- This is Duffy's vision of her mother's glamorous past as she hopes it might have been.
Test yourself on Themes
How does the narrator describe her cries in Before You Were Mine?