The Emigree Flashcards
Context
Poet - Rumens
Structure
Soliloquy / Monologue
Caesura / Ellipses in line 1 indicates memory
Volta after line 22
Light imagery
Presents memory of city in positive way
‘white’ - heavenly
‘bright filled paperweight’
Suggests her memories are stable and her view is fixed.
Adds value
City extended metaphor for lost childhood
No adult can return
‘My city takes me dancing through the city / of walls’
Connotes entrapment
Repetition of ‘they’
Speaker feeling oppressed by them (‘circle me’)
‘Sick with tyrants’
Personification
Home has been invaded and may possibly have changed
Semantic field of war:
-‘frontiers’
-‘war’
Sense that the city isn’t as perfect as the speaker remembers it
“That child’s vocabulary I carried here”
Remainders of speaker’s native language and how it seems the most natural speech for her is part of her identity