AQA GCSE in English Literature · Free · no account needed

Grade 9 Notes: Before You Were Mine

Carol Ann Duffy · A Love and Relationships poem on AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) — not on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE (4ET1) · Before You Were Mine

Before You Were Mine is spoken by a grown child, the speaker, to the speaker's own mother. The speaker imagines the young woman the mother was in the ten years before the speaker was born: laughing helplessly with two friends on a street corner, her polka-dot dress lifted by the wind about her legs like a film star's; dancing in a crowded ballroom full of cinematic hopes about who might walk her home; coming in late to a mother waiting to punish her, and deciding it was worth it. Then the speaker's own memories break in: playing with the mother's high-heeled red shoes, now kept like relics; being taught dance steps on the pavement on the way home from Mass. Through it all runs a teasing, loving, slightly possessive voice that wants the bold, glamorous girl who existed before motherhood. Revise it as a poem about a child's love for a parent, and what a woman gave up when she became a mother. Notice the present tense that makes the past feel alive, the movie imagery, the questions the speaker asks the mother, and the title phrase that returns at the very end. The poem is in copyright and no quotation from it could be checked against the poet's or publisher's own text, so these notes quote nothing: every moment is described closely enough to find on the page. If the poem is printed on your paper, quote it from there.

Build your reading of Before You Were Mine, teach it to an AI pupil, then defend it in a marked debate — this page carries all three.

What is this exam testing?

Before You Were Mine is examined on one course Incandio supports: AQA GCSE English Literature (8702), as one of the fifteen poems in the Love and Relationships cluster on Paper 2. You meet it in one of two ways — printed on the paper as the named poem, or remembered as the poem you choose to set beside a different named poem. Both routes reward the same three things: an argument of your own (AO1), close attention to how the poem's language, form and structure make that argument (AO2), and context that genuinely changes how a line reads (AO3 — on this course AO3 means context, not comparison). For Before You Were Mine that means a view about what the poem does with a grown child and the young woman the speaker's mother once was, a set of precisely described moments, and one or two pieces of context — the dance-hall culture of the mid-twentieth century, and the freedoms a young woman of that time was expected to give up when she became a mother — welded to a moment.

AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) — Paper 2, Section B: Poetry (Love and Relationships)

Section B asks one comparative question on the cluster. One poem is named and printed; you choose a second from the same cluster and write about it from memory. There is no separate mark for comparing: comparison is the task itself, credited through the quality of your argument and your analysis. Accuracy of spelling and grammar (AO4) is not credited on this question, though clear writing still carries the argument. On Pearson Edexcel International GCSE the same AO codes mean different things; never carry them across.

AO1 · A personal, critical response, supported by references

What the examiner wants: An argument about what the poem does with the relationship, not a list of things the mother did when young. The strongest answers ask what the possessive title means: whether the speaker's love honours the mother's lost freedom, or claims and replaces it.

Scoring highly: Range across the poem: the corner and the laughing friends; the film-star comparison; the ballroom and its hopes; the mother's own mother waiting at the door; the speaker's yell as a baby and the red shoes; the ghost on the pavement; the dance steps after Mass; the return of the title in the final line. Keep a second poem in every paragraph.

Top band vs the band below: Top answers read the possessive as a problem the poem knows about: noticing that the speaker loves the mother is an observation; arguing that the word mine in the title marks the very moment the glamorous girl ended — so the speaker's love is also the cause of what the speaker mourns — is a concept.

The common mistake: Treating the poem as a simple fond portrait and missing the guilt and possessiveness inside the speaker's voice.

In your essay: Open with a comparative thesis that names both poems and the difference that matters, then build three or four paragraphs that each hold both poems, and finish on what the pairing shows that neither poem shows alone.

AO2 · Language, form and structure, with subject terminology

What the examiner wants: Analysis of Duffy's methods: second-person address; present tense for an imagined past; film and cinema imagery; questions and tag questions; colloquial and Scots words; the red shoes as a symbol; the ghost; the four five-line stanzas in free verse; the circular return of the title.

Scoring highly: Read the tense as meaning: the speaker describes a time before the speaker's birth in the present tense, so the past is brought alive and made to happen in front of the speaker, while the speaker's own childhood memories are told in the past.

Top band vs the band below: The best answers trace the title phrase: it appears in the middle of the poem and again as its final words, so the poem ends where it can never arrive — in a time the speaker could only imagine, before the speaker existed.

The common mistake: Spotting the film-star comparison without saying what it does to the mother, or to the speaker's way of seeing her.

In your essay: In each paragraph name the method, pin down the words or moment doing the work, say what it does to a reader, then say what the partner poem does differently. Make at least one point about form or structure.

AO3 · Context — the relationship between the poem and the world it comes from

What the examiner wants: How the poem's world shapes it: the popularity of public dance halls among young people in the mid-twentieth century; strict, often physical discipline in many working-class homes; the expectation that a woman's independent social life would end with motherhood; and the glamour of Hollywood film stars of the era.

Scoring highly: One clause at a time: because a young woman of that time was expected to give up nights at the dance hall once she had children, the red shoes the speaker played with as a child are not just old shoes but the remains of a life that motherhood closed.

Top band vs the band below: Context that generates a reading: because the culture of the time expected motherhood to replace a woman's youth rather than sit beside it, the speaker's yell as a baby can be read as the sound that ended the mother's freedom, which turns the poem's celebration into something closer to an apology.

The common mistake: Paragraphs on 1950s Hollywood that never touch a moment in the poem.

In your essay: Two or three contextual clauses across the essay, each welded to a moment in a poem and each changing what that moment means. Never a paragraph of background on its own.

Avoid. Reading the title as a romantic love poem and stopping there. The poem borrows the language of romance for a grown child and a mother, and that borrowing is part of what it is doing.

Examiner insight. A strong comparative opening names a method: both Duffy and Armitage write about a mother and child, but Armitage's speaker is the one moving away from the mother into a life of their own, while Duffy's speaker reaches back into the life the mother had before the speaker was born.

If you choose this as your partner poem, carry its shape: a first stanza of the mother laughing on a corner; a second of the ballroom and the late return home; a third where the speaker's own birth, the red shoes and the ghost appear; a fourth of the dance steps and the return of the title.

The speaker and the figures

The speaker (the grown child)

A grown child imagining the speaker's own mother before motherhood, with love, envy and a little guilt

The speaker is an adult child who addresses the mother directly throughout. The speaker imagines scenes from the decade before the speaker's birth, setting them in the present tense as if watching them happen: the mother on a street corner bent double with laughter beside two friends; the mother in a ballroom full of hopes; the mother coming home late to a punishment and not caring. The speaker insists on not being there yet, not even a thought in anyone's head. Then the speaker's own memories enter: the speaker's own noisy, possessive crying as a baby; small childhood hands in the mother's high-heeled red shoes; the mother teaching the child dance steps on the walk home from Mass. The speaker's voice is affectionate, playful and teasing, but it also carries an undertone of envy and guilt: the speaker wants the glamorous girl, and knows that the speaker's own arrival is what ended that girl's freedom. The title describes the speaker's claim on the mother, and the poem keeps asking what that claim cost. The poem never says whether the speaker is a son or a daughter; it is often read as a daughter speaking, but an essay should rest on what the poem says.

The imagining speaker

Most of the poem is the speaker picturing a time the speaker could not have seen. The speaker describes it in vivid, confident detail, as though the speaker were there.

Key moment. The speaker standing, in imagination, a decade distant from the street corner where the mother is laughing (Stanza 1). The opening sets a distance in time as though it were a distance in space. The speaker can look at the scene but cannot step into it.

Key moment. The speaker insisting on not being there yet, not even a thought in anyone's mind at the ballroom (Stanza 2). A blunt, short statement. The speaker's absence is the condition of the mother's freedom, and the speaker says so directly.

Key moment. The speaker claiming to have known that the mother would dance like that (Stanza 2). The speaker claims knowledge of a time before the speaker's birth. It is loving certainty, and it is also a kind of possession: the speaker even owns the mother's past.

The speaker arrives

In the third stanza the speaker's own life breaks into the poem: the speaker's birth, early childhood, and present-day vision of the mother as a ghost.

Key moment. The speaker asking whether the ten years before the speaker's own noisy, possessive crying as a baby were the best of the mother's life (Stanza 3). A casual, conversational question with a hard edge. The speaker's own crying as a baby is described as possessive, and the speaker suspects that this birth ended the mother's best years.

Key moment. The speaker remembering small childhood hands inside the mother's high-heeled red shoes, now called relics (Stanza 3). The shoes of the dancing girl became a child's toy. Calling them relics treats them as sacred remains of something dead and gone.

Key moment. The speaker teasing the mother about who left love bites on her neck, calling her sweetheart (Stanza 3). The roles reverse for a moment: the grown child speaks like a nosy, teasing parent or friend. It is affectionate and a little intrusive.

Wanting the bold girl

The final stanza moves between memory and longing. The speaker wanted, even as a child, the girl who existed before the speaker.

Key moment. The speaker admitting to having wanted, even as a child, the daring, flirtatious girl from before the speaker's birth (Stanza 4). The speaker's love is for a version of the mother the speaker can never have. The longing is generous and possessive at once.

Key moment. The poem ending on the title phrase, with the mother shining, dancing and laughing (Final line). The final words place the mother forever in the time before. The speaker's imagination preserves what the speaker's birth ended.

How Duffy builds the speaker in language and structure

The speaker talks to the mother throughout, using the second person. The whole poem is addressed to one listener, which makes it feel intimate and conversational, like a grown child talking to a mother across a kitchen table.

The speaker's voice is colloquial and teasing. The speaker uses a tag question at the end of a sentence, as people do in casual speech, and also uses the affectionate, slightly mocking endearment sweetheart. The informal tone makes the poem warm, and also lets the speaker say difficult things lightly.

The speaker describes the mother's youth in the present tense, as though watching it happen, and the speaker's own childhood in the past tense. The imagined past is brighter and more alive than the remembered one.

The speaker keeps appearing in the poem: ten years away, not here yet, not even a thought. The repeated reminders of the speaker's absence show that the speaker cannot stop thinking about the effect of the speaker's own presence.

The speaker in context

Motherhood and freedom. For many women of the mid-twentieth century, marriage and motherhood brought a sharp end to an independent social life of dancing and nights out. The speaker's sense that the speaker's birth ended the mother's best decade draws on that expectation.

Scotland in the poem. The poem's Scots words, the close where the young woman's own mother waits and the hiding she risks, and the girl somewhere in Scotland place the mother's youth in a particular working-class world. Use these details as the poem gives them, as setting, not as facts about real people.

Relationships

  • The mother — The woman the speaker loves and claims, and the girl the speaker can only imagine.
  • The mother's younger self — A glamorous, free figure the speaker envies and mourns.

What The speaker (the grown child) stands for

  • The red shoes: the mother's lost freedom, handed down as a toy.
  • The ghost: a past that survives only in imagination.
  • The title phrase: the speaker's claim, and the line the speaker's birth drew across the mother's life.

Why Duffy made The speaker (the grown child)

  • To celebrate a mother's youth and spirit.
  • To show a child's possessive, consuming love.
  • To recognise what motherhood cost a young woman.

Other readings

  • A loving, admiring grown child paying tribute.
  • A grown child who feels guilty that the speaker's own birth ended the mother's freedom.
  • A possessive grown child who wants even the mother's past as a possession.

Essay arguments

  • Duffy presents a speaker whose admiration for the mother's lost youth is mixed with an uneasy awareness that the speaker's own birth brought it to an end.
  • The speaker's teasing, possessive voice presents love between parent and child as something that can claim as well as cherish.
  • By returning to the title in the final line, Duffy presents the speaker's imagination as the only place where the mother's freedom survives.

In theme essays

  • Parents and children.
  • Youth, freedom and sacrifice.
  • Memory and imagination.

Questions that get asked

  • How does Duffy present the relationship between a grown child and a mother in Before You Were Mine and one other poem from Love and Relationships?
  • How do poets present a child looking back at a parent in Before You Were Mine and one other poem from Love and Relationships?

The mother

A lively, glamorous young woman, seen through the eyes of the child she will have

The mother is never given a voice. She exists only in her child's imagination and memory. As a young woman she is fun-loving and daring: she laughs until she bends double with her friends, wears a polka-dot dress that blows round her legs, dances in a ballroom full of hopes, and risks her own mother's punishment by staying out late. As a mother she still carries some of that spirit: her red shoes survive, and she teaches her small child dance steps on the pavement on the way home from Mass. The speaker imagines her as a ghost of her younger self, clattering towards the speaker in heels. She is presented as a whole person with a life of her own before her child, which is exactly what the title says the speaker took away.

The young woman

The mother's youth is described in images of movement, laughter and glamour.

Key moment. The mother and her two friends doubled up with laughter, clutching one another and screaming with it down at the street (Stanza 1). Helpless, physical laughter. The young women are free, loud and unselfconscious.

Key moment. The mother's polka-dot dress lifted by the wind about her legs, followed by a one-word comparison to the film star Marilyn Monroe (Stanza 1). The single name turns a street corner into a film set and the mother into a screen idol.

Key moment. The mother's own mother waiting at the entrance with a beating for the late daughter, and the young woman judging it worth it (Stanza 2). Freedom has a price, and the young woman is willing to pay it. Her defiance is part of her glamour.

The mother as a mother

In the speaker's memories the mother keeps traces of her younger self.

Key moment. The mother teaching her child dance steps on the way home from Mass (Stanza 4). The dance-hall girl survives inside the mother, passing her steps on. The church walk and the dancing sit side by side.

Key moment. The mother's ghost clattering towards the speaker in heels across a city square (Stanza 3). The young woman returns as a ghost: vivid and noisy, but no longer alive. The past haunts the present.

How Duffy builds the mother in language and structure

The mother is built entirely from images. She never speaks. Everything we know of her comes through the speaker's imagination or memory.

She is associated with verbs of energy: laughing, shrieking, dancing, clattering, shining, dancing. The verbs keep her moving, so she is always alive in the poem's present.

The film-star comparison and the cinematic language of the ballroom frame her as glamorous and larger than life — a star in her child's private film.

The mother in context

The dance hall. Public dance halls and ballrooms were a popular part of social life for young people in Britain in the mid-twentieth century, a place to meet partners and escape home life. The mother's dancing belongs to that world.

Discipline at home. Physical punishment of children and teenagers at home was widely accepted at the time. The young woman's own mother waiting with a beating shows the discipline she was willing to defy.

Relationships

  • Her child — The child whose birth ended her youth, and who loves and imagines that youth.
  • Her friends — Companions of her carefree years, laughing with her on the corner.
  • Her own mother — A strict parent waiting at home with a punishment.

What The mother stands for

  • The polka-dot dress: youth, movement and glamour.
  • The red shoes: dancing, sexuality and a life left behind.

Why Duffy made The mother

  • To show a woman as an individual before she became a parent.
  • To make the reader feel what motherhood can cost.

Other readings

  • A carefree, glamorous girl.
  • A woman who sacrificed her freedom for her child.
  • A mother who kept some of her spirit and passed it on.

Essay arguments

  • Duffy presents the mother as a vivid, independent young woman whose glamour belongs to a past her child can only reconstruct.
  • The mother teaching dance steps on the way home from Mass suggests that her younger self was not entirely lost, only passed on.

In theme essays

  • Youth, freedom and sacrifice.
  • Parents and children.

Questions that get asked

  • How is the mother presented in Before You Were Mine?
  • How do poets present parents in Before You Were Mine and one other poem from Love and Relationships?

The themes

Parents and children

A grown child's love for a mother, and the child's claim on her.

The poem is a grown child's tribute to a mother, but it is a complicated one. The speaker admires, envies and teases the mother, and describes the speaker's own love as possessive. Even the speaker's infant crying is called a possessive cry.

The title shows the problem. A child naturally thinks of a parent as belonging to the child. But the title marks the moment the mother became the speaker's, and the poem is about everything that existed before that moment. The speaker wants both the mother and the free girl the mother was, and the speaker cannot have both.

The relationship includes a reversal. When the speaker teases the mother about love bites and calls her sweetheart, the speaker sounds like a nosy parent questioning a teenager. For a moment, the child takes charge of the mother's past.

The poem also shows something passed down. The mother teaches her child dance steps; the red shoes become the child's playthings. The mother's youth lives on partly in her child. That makes the relationship one of inheritance as well as loss.

Use this in an essay. Duffy presents a speaker whose love for the mother is generous and possessive at once: the speaker celebrates the free girl the mother was while knowing that the speaker's own birth, the moment the mother became the speaker's, is what ended that freedom.

Youth, freedom and sacrifice

What a young woman gave up to become a mother.

Much of the poem celebrates youth as a time of freedom: laughter on a street corner, dancing, hopes of romance, defiance of rules. The young mother is unselfconscious and daring.

Against this, the poem sets the arrival of a child. The speaker's yell, the red shoes turned into toys and kept as relics, the ghost of a younger self — all suggest that motherhood closed off that free life.

The poem never says the mother regrets her child. It is the speaker who asks whether the years before the speaker's birth were the best ones. The question reveals the speaker's own guilt more than the mother's feelings. Keep this distinction in your writing: the mother's view is never given.

The final line preserves the free girl in the speaker's imagination, where she still shines, dances and laughs. The poem cannot give the mother back her youth, but it can keep it alive in words.

Use this in an essay. Duffy presents motherhood as a sacrifice seen from the child's side: the red shoes that once danced become a toddler's plaything and then relics, so a single object carries a whole life given up.

Memory and imagination (minor)

A past the speaker never saw, made vivid.

The poem mixes three kinds of time: the imagined years before the speaker's birth, the speaker's remembered childhood, and the present moment in which the speaker sees the mother's ghost. They blur into each other.

The imagined past is the most vivid. It is told in the present tense, full of sound and movement. The remembered childhood is told in the past, and the present is haunted. Imagination, here, is stronger than memory.

The ghost image suggests that the young mother is both present and absent: the speaker can see her clearly, as clearly as a smell can bring back a memory, but she is not real. The poem is honest that it is reconstructing someone it never met.

Glamour and the cinema (minor)

A mother imagined as a film star.

The poem repeatedly borrows from the cinema: the comparison to Marilyn Monroe, the movie hopes of the ballroom, the scene under a tree with lights like a film set. The speaker sees the mother's youth as a film.

This glamour is both loving and unreal. It shows how much the speaker admires the mother, and also how far the speaker's picture is a fantasy. The mother of the poem is partly a star the speaker has invented.

Context

Context: the dance hall and the cost of motherhood

The poet. The poem belongs to the Love and Relationships cluster, where it sits beside other poems about parents and children such as Mother, any distance and Eden Rock. Carol Ann Duffy was the UK's Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2019. Before You Were Mine was published in her collection Mean Time in 1993, a book that won both the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Prize. The poem's Scottish details — the close, the hiding, a girl somewhere in Scotland — place the mother's youth in a particular world; the poem never names its speaker, so do not treat the speaker as the poet.

Dance halls and motherhood. In the mid-twentieth century, public dance halls and ballrooms were a central part of social life for young people, especially young working people, offering music, dancing and the chance of romance. Hollywood stars such as Marilyn Monroe were symbols of glamour. For many women, though, marriage and children brought this life to an end: the expectation was that a mother's freedom would give way to the home. The poem's red shoes and the speaker's guilty question about the best decade both draw meaning from that expectation.

Use context in single clauses attached to moments: the ballroom with the dance-hall culture of the time; the red shoes with the expectation that motherhood replaced youth; the punishment at the door with strict family discipline.

Form, voice and comparison

Form: four five-line stanzas in free verse

The poem has four stanzas of five lines each, with no regular rhyme scheme and no fixed metre. The stanzas give it a steady, controlled shape, while the free verse lets it sound like natural speech.

The conversational form suits a grown child talking to a mother. Sentences run across line breaks and stanza breaks, as thoughts do when someone is remembering out loud.

The even stanzas hold together material from very different times: a youth the speaker never saw, the speaker's own childhood, and the present. The regular shape keeps that mixture orderly.

Structure: from the corner to the title

The first two stanzas belong to the imagined years before the speaker's birth: the street corner, the ballroom, the late return home. The third stanza brings in the speaker directly — the speaker's birth, early childhood, and present-day vision of the mother as a ghost. The fourth begins with a childhood memory and ends back in the time before.

The structure is circular. The poem begins with the mother laughing on a pavement and ends with her laughing still, and the title phrase that appears in the second stanza returns as the final words. The poem ends where it began, in a time the speaker could never enter.

Language: tense, voice and the cinema

Duffy uses the present tense for the imagined past, which makes the young mother vivid and alive. The speaker's own memories use the past tense, which makes them feel finished.

The language is colloquial and partly Scots: the mother's mother is called Ma, the entrance where she waits is the close, and the punishment is a hiding. These words root the poem in a real, working-class world.

The cinematic language — the film-star name, the movie hopes, the scene lit like a film set — turns the mother into a screen heroine, which is both admiring and unreal.

Symbols: shoes, ghost, title

The red shoes stand for the mother's dancing, glamour and sexuality. Once worn in ballrooms, they become a small child's toy and then relics: the remains of a life now over. The ghost stands for the younger self who is gone but keeps returning in the speaker's imagination. The title phrase stands for the moment of ownership that divided the mother's life in two.

Together they show a past that cannot be recovered but will not disappear.

Key words and what they carry

close: A Scots word for the shared entrance or stairway of a tenement building. The young woman's mother waits there.

hiding: A colloquial word for a beating, a physical punishment.

relics: Objects kept from the past and treated with reverence, especially the remains of saints.

Mass: The main service of the Catholic Church. Mother and child walk home from it.

cha-cha: A Latin-American ballroom dance, here sounded out as an exclamation.

Precise meanings support analysis: relics adds a religious sense of reverence and death to the shoes; close and hiding place the young woman in a strict, ordinary home she was willing to defy.

Comparison: the strongest partners

Mother, any distance (Armitage) is the closest partner: both are spoken by a grown child to a mother. Armitage's speaker is moving away into a home of their own while the mother holds on; Duffy's speaker reaches back into the life the mother had before the speaker was born.

Eden Rock (Causley) also imagines parents as young people, seen by their grown child: Causley's parents picnic, young again, across a stream. Follower (Heaney) looks back at a parent with admiration and ends with a troubling reversal. Walking Away (Day-Lewis) gives the parent's side of separation.

Grade 9 insight. Compare methods: Duffy's present-tense imagined past and cinema imagery; Armitage's extended metaphor of the tape measure; Causley's precise picnic details and calm ending; Heaney's craft vocabulary and reversal.

Readings to weigh

Another reading. A tribute reading: the poem celebrates a mother's youth and spirit with affection and humour.

Another reading. A guilt reading: the speaker knows the speaker's birth ended the mother's freedom, and the poem is partly an apology.

Another reading. A possessive reading: the speaker's love is so consuming that the speaker wants even the mother's past as a possession.

Shock the examiner: what most answers miss

Most answers call this a loving tribute to a mother. It is — but the title is a possessive, and the speaker describes the speaker's own baby crying as possessive too. The poem knows that the love it celebrates is also the thing that ended the mother's freedom.

The imagined past is in the present tense; the speaker's real memories are in the past tense. The time the speaker never saw is more alive than the time the speaker lived through.

The red shoes become relics — a word for the remains of saints. The speaker treats the mother's youth with something close to religious reverence, and the word quietly admits that youth is dead.

When the speaker teases the mother about love bites and calls her sweetheart, the speaker talks like a parent to a teenager. The roles reverse for one line.

The poem's last words are its title. It ends in the one place the speaker can never be: before the speaker existed.

Thesis statements

  • Duffy presents a speaker whose celebration of the mother's youth is shadowed by the knowledge that the speaker's own birth ended it.
  • Before You Were Mine uses the present tense for a past the speaker never saw, so the imagined youth is more alive than the remembered childhood.
  • The possessive title presents a child's love for a parent as a claim as well as a gift.
  • The red shoes, turned from dancing shoes into a toy and then relics, carry the whole cost of motherhood in a single object.
  • By ending on its own title, the poem preserves the free young woman in the only place she still exists — the speaker's imagination.

Essay plans

How does Duffy present the relationship between a parent and child in Before You Were Mine and one other poem from Love and Relationships?

Thesis: Both Duffy and Armitage write as grown children addressing their mothers, but Armitage's speaker looks forward to a life apart while the mother holds on, whereas Duffy's speaker looks back to a life the mother had before the speaker's birth, which the speaker both treasures and knows that birth ended.

  1. Direction: one grown child moving away against another grown child reaching back.
  2. Imagery: a tape measure stretched to breaking against red shoes, a ballroom and a ghost.
  3. Voice: one grown child's direct, practical address against a grown child's teasing, possessive one.
  4. Endings: a grown child facing an open sky against a mother preserved in the title. Conclude on letting go and holding on.

How do poets present memories of parents in Before You Were Mine and one other poem from Love and Relationships?

Thesis: Duffy and Causley both picture parents as young people, but Causley's young parents call calmly to their grown child across a stream, while Duffy's young mother exists only before her child, in a past the speaker knows the speaker's own arrival closed.

  1. Imagined youth: a laughing girl on a corner against a picnic across a stream.
  2. Detail: cinema glamour against plain, exact objects.
  3. Time: blurred past and present against a single still moment.
  4. Endings: a title returning against a calm invitation. Conclude on separation and reunion.

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