Themes
English Lit: AQA GCSE Poetry - Power & Conflict, topic 12.1.2
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:
Repeated possessive pronouns
- Frequent use of possessive pronouns (e.g. “my city”) conveys the speaker’s deep admiration for, and pride in, her city.
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.
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…”.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Test yourself on Themes
What techniques does Rumens use to emphasise the speaker's love of her city?
Which of these is NOT a quote somehow showing the speaker's love for her city?
What's a good interpretation for why Rumens chose not to name the city in The Emigree?
Which of these phrases may suggest that the speaker of The Emigree is an exile?
Which of these is not something that contributes to the sense of mystery in The Emigree?