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On your desk · Poetry · Higher
Originally
Carol Ann Duffy
The big picture
A childhood move becomes a question about belonging. The speaker gradually adapts to a new place, but gaining a new accent does not give her a simple answer about where she comes from.
“All childhood is an emigration.”
A change of country becomes a way of understanding growing up itself. Childhood involves leaving familiar ways of speaking and living, making the personal experience relevant beyond literal migration.
- Whose voice are we hearing?
- A retrospective first-person speaker moves between a child’s confusion and an adult’s uncertainty.
- How does it develop?
- Three stanzas move from departure, through disorientation, to adaptation. The unresolved final hesitation resists the tidy conclusion that fitting in means recovering a secure identity.
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