BEFORE YOU

WERE MINE
Gabby
CONTEXT-
1950'S
WOMEN
Before you were mine- Ideas

■ Portrays the narrator conversing with her mother, whilst looking at an

old photograph of her.
■ The poem never mentions looking at a photograph but Duffy has
affirmed that this is  the case. The poem portrays her mother as a
glamorous woman, in her younger days and explores the way she
changed with time due to motherhood.
 Before you were mine

I'm ten years away from the corner you laugh

on
with your pals, Maggie McGeeney and Jean
Duff. Laid out in regular
form like a photo
The three of you bend from the waist, holding
album
each other, or your knees, and shriek at the
pavement.
Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs.
Marilyn. Marilyn Monroe
represents glamour and
fame
I'm not here yet. The thought of me doesn't
occur
Images of a carefree and in the ballroom with the thousand eyes, the
happy world fizzy, movie tomorrows
the right walk home could bring. I knew you
would dance
like that. Before you were mine, your Ma
stands at the close
with a hiding for the late one. You reckon it's
worth it.
Address and Audience

■ this poem is directly addressed to the poet’s mother, which we see even in the title. Again, we sense that
same feeling of being an intruder in something that is intimate and personal, putting the reader in the
position of Duffy’s mother. This use of a very personal tone makes us an insider in that relationship,
reading things we might never have read as an outsider. We get to share in something that is private and
reflective. Unlike Walking Away or Mother, this poem doesn’t just take one moment for reflection: it uses
the first memory, perhaps a photograph, as a springboard to explore her mother’s life at that time,
imagining the life her mother leads, the conversations she may have had. In terms of the way the ideas
are structured in the poem, we get a sense of a passage through time, each stanza marking a shift in time
or place.
■ Unusually, Duffy isn’t writing from a fixed point in her own existence, either. Her own reference point isn’t
clear, moving from “I’m not here yet” to “I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes” and
“You’d teach me the steps”. Just like our memories, there’s no sense of beginning or ending – we shift
between them in the exact same way our memory does, and we move fluidly from one to another. There
is a kind of sense of linear progression, from her mother’s teenage years to the first years of motherhood,
but it isn’t clearly defined. What I particularly like about the poem is the notion of “relics”, the objects
from the past that create a trace of that moment and evoke that time when you look at them. I think the
poem does that. It feels like an archive of a sort, a collection of memories that serve to define her mother.
Structure and Form analysis

■ Duffy writes in free verse, much more than any other poet we have yet seen in the selection other than Owen Sheers. She is not
playing with sonnets and half-rhyme as Armitage does. Her stanzas work like paragraphs, each stanza with a new focus. The last
line brings the poem back to the title and back to the beginning. We have various time references, but the poem is not
chronological. Or, it is loosely chronological. The final stanza refers to a time when Duffy was born, harking back to a past even
then. The first three stanzas seem to cover the ten years before Duffy was born, but we have no sense of the sequence of
events, if indeed they are real events. Duffy certainly presents them as if they are, though. There’s a sense that these memories
are actual events, due to the biographical details she gives us… the people who were there, the laughter, the setting. She sets
up a tableau, almost creating a photograph or video clip in our minds of precisely what her mother was doing. The way she
includes little movements, “you laugh”, “the three of you bend from the waist, holding each other… shriek at the pavement…
your polka-dot skirt blows round your legs” – this sense of motion and movement is what brings the poem to life for me.
■ The poem is written in free-verse, with lots of enjambment and caesura which I’ll consider when we get to language, since it has
more of an impact on the words and their meaning. The poem is organised with four even stanzas of five lines. The syllabic
length of the lines varies but is generally fairly even too. The title threads through the poem, picking up in verse two and again
in verse five, connecting the beginning to the ending. It remains the strong focus of the poem, but it also adds to this sense of
time-travelling, the moving backwards and forwards between the past and the present, like loops rather than a strict chronology.
The poem is also framed by the two pavements, the pavements with Maggie McGeeney and Jean Duff, and “the wrong
pavement” on the way home from Mass. Each verse seems to cover a tableau, making it seem like a selection of photographs
and artefacts of her mother’s life. I’ve got a box of relics from my life and it’s like she has the same, picking out one thing after
another and using it as a key to evoke an (imagined?) memory from that time. Maybe the writer knows these moments for sure
if her mother has told her the story behind the photograph or the object, or maybe she’s just imagining them.
Quote and Stanza Analysis –
Stanza
■ In stanza three,3
Duffy continues this idea, a rather bitter tone to her question,
“the decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one, eh?” and we
sense her envy that she did not get to share this side of her mother, and we
begin to see that they carve out a new story, she remembers “my hands” in
her mother’s shoes and calls them “relics”. Things change. Red heels may be
fine for the life she had before Duffy was born, but after her daughter arrives,
they are “relics” and playthings for her daughter. The memory is layered: as a
daughter, Duffy remembers putting her hands in the shoes, and she imagines
her mother wearing them as she “clatters” towards her. This has a couple of
senses we can take from it: is her mother now dead, hence the “ghost”? Or is
it that hazy kind of memory (even though this is one that Duffy is
constructing) and her mother seems like a ghost as the memory materialises?
If her mother is dead at the time of the poem, it takes on a new level of
sentimental pathos: it’s not just the woman her mother was that Duffy is
“possessive” over, but everything to do with her mother. The simile “clear as
scent” is interesting, since scent is not clear to see at all, a vapour, and we
realise her mother is not there at all. Still, Duffy sees the details as she has
done before, the tree lit up that forms the background, the fact her mother
has lovebites. The way she calls her mother “sweetheart” is curious too –
something of a role reversal. We remember that this is the adult Duffy writing,
and she is much older when writing than her mother was in the memory,
which adds to the sense of role-reversal. These questions show a curiosity