Before You Were Mine — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Before You Were Mine
The poems
What you need to know
Before You Were Mine by Carol Ann Duffy: what it is about, its context, and how Duffy uses language, form and structure.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the cluster it compares well with, with similarities and differences.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I'm ten years away from the corner you laugh on', 'Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn.', 'the fizzy, movie tomorrows', 'with a hiding for the late one', 'my loud, possessive yell', 'relics', 'and now your ghost clatters toward me over George Square', 'stamping stars from the wrong pavement', 'before you were mine'.
Form: four five-line stanzas of free verse addressed to the mother, and the present tense used for the past.
Context: Duffy's mother in 1950s Glasgow, and Marilyn Monroe as an image of glamour.
Comparisons with Eden Rock, Follower and Mother, any distance.
