Recommended Reading
BEFORE YOU WERE MINE by Carol Ann Duffy
I think this is a very moving poem. A daughter expresses the depth and sincerity of her love for her mother, and her awareness of what motherhood did to her. Duffy’s love is unselfish; she knows that, in many ways, the best part of her mother’s life was before she herself was born, and she accepts this willingly.
She likes to picture her mother as she was in her youth: young, glamorous and excited with life. She loves her mother for who and what she was as a young person. It’s a poem of acknowledgement.
The present tense in stanza 1 helps the poet to recapture a moment in her mother’s youth when she was carefree, enjoying a joke with her girlfriends. She mentions her mother’s girlhood friends by name, entering into the moment and proudly relishing her mother’s time of carefree glamour:
‘Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn’.
It’s as though her mother has so frequently talked about those happy times that her daughter is easily able to picture them.
In this poem, past, present and future merge: the poet is ‘not here yet’ but is able to watch. She reveals her intimate connection to her mother by showing a desire to share in her past, yet there is nothing grasping about her attitude; she’s not demanding a share of her mother’s past, but generously conceding that motherhood was not the be-all-and-end-all of her life. She even delights to think of her mother’s casual liaisons with boys:
‘the fizzzy, movie tomorrows / the right walk home could bring’.
Duffy attempts to join the conspiracy, very much as a friend would have done, cheekily asking,
‘And whose small bites on your neck, sweetheart?’
As the poet walks in George Square, the reconstructed past is more immediate to her than the physical present:
‘and now your ghost clatters towards me…till I see you, clear as scent, under a tree.’
Duffy’s romantic view of her mother’s youth comes across strongly in the final stanza. It is poignant that her mother taught her the dance steps on the way home from doing her religious duty by attending Mass; it’s as though her mother is trying to preserve something of the person she was.
Ultimately, the image that Duffy treasures most of her mother is of the time before she was born, before she was burdened with responsibilities, before her ‘sparkle and waltz and laughter’ were extinguished.
