The Émigrée — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
The Émigrée
The poems
What you need to know
The Émigrée by Carol Rumens (1983): a woman who left her country as a child keeps a bright memory of its city, however dark the news, while she is treated as an outsider where she lives now.
Rumens's poem of an unnamed country, the three stanzas ending in 'sunlight' and the personified city, key quotations, and the poems it compares well with.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'There once was a country', 'my memory of it is sunlight-clear', 'the bright, filled paperweight', 'It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants', 'glow even clearer as time rolls its tanks', 'like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar', 'It tastes of sunlight', 'I have no passport, there's no way back at all', 'I comb its hair and love its shining eyes', 'and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight'.
Form: three stanzas of free verse, each ending on the word 'sunlight', a fairy-tale opening, and the city personified as a child or pet the speaker cares for.
Structure: from the past tense of leaving to the present, as the remembered city comes to the speaker while the people around her accuse and circle her.
Context: Rumens (1944 to 2026), born in London, who translated Russian poets such as Irina Ratushinskaya; the anthology dates the poem 1983, the year of her collection Star Whisper; a country and city that are never named, so they can stand for many places lost to war and tyranny.
Compares well with Island Man (a homeland remembered in another city), We Refugees (exile) and My Mother's Kitchen (a lost home and the hope of return).
