My Nine Year Old Self Flashcards
Title
Personal and nostalgic
‘You must forgive me’
Forceful, regret, enjambment, erratic energy
‘Eager to be gone’
Energy - contrast with tired person
‘Balancing’
Child is able to do anything
‘Tightrope’
Caesura, breaks the Rhythm
‘Spoiled this body’
Semantic field, injury, loss of joy, weakened version of poet
Stanza two
Joyful ness in stanza one is dulled
‘Look at the scars’
Imperative beth, too young to comprehend what ageing is
‘Bad back of a bruised foot’
Monosyllabic, king and slow representing old age, alliteration
‘We’d’
Trying to draw the child close to her
‘Summer morning’
Pathetic fallacy, nostalgia, sun - joy
- rhetorical question
‘That dream we had’
Past tense
‘White paper’
Purity and innocence juxtaposes ‘cloud your mourning’
Hyphen
More constant speech
- emblem of excited youth
- enjambment and freedom - lack of restraints
Taste
Sherbet lemons
‘Summer of ambition’
Tone changes to pessimistic take on life, ranger
‘Nothing in common’
Bitter, disassociating herself
‘Tuppence a pound’
Emphasises age gap, imperial rather than metric
‘Scared lanes’
Full of fear
‘Swings from that tree’
Adventure, returned difference ‘ tree’ ‘long buried’
- mental division, physical distance, bliss is over
‘Cloud your morning’
Faded and grey, can’t return to childhood
Varies between
1st and 2nd person
‘We’ ‘I’ ‘you’
Pronouns illustrate change, pieces don’t fit together
3 rapid change
Quick and unstrained nature of childhood
- mourning past
Concrete noun
‘Tightrope’
- believable and reliable
Tone
‘Walk’ ‘run’ ‘climb’
Last stanza
Echoes first stanza 1st person
‘I leave you’
Distance and disconnection between current narrator and 9 year old
‘Ripe scab’
Sadder version of childhood
‘Scar’
New and exciting
‘Scab’
Old age
2nd person
Represents lack of youth
