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On your desk · Poetry · Higher
In Mrs Tilscher’s Class
Carol Ann Duffy
The big picture
A remembered primary classroom offers imagination, affection and protection. As the year progresses, bodily change and new knowledge draw the child towards an adult world the teacher cannot completely explain or control.
“The classroom glowed like a sweet shop.”
The comparison makes learning colourful, inviting and pleasurable. Its appeal to a child’s senses establishes the classroom as a protected place of delight before the poem introduces more disturbing knowledge.
- Whose voice are we hearing?
- Second-person address draws the reader inside an affectionate but increasingly unsettled childhood memory.
- How does it develop?
- The school year supplies a chronological movement from security to restlessness. Changing tadpoles anticipate the child’s development; the final storm makes leaving childhood both exciting and threatening.
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