Similarities Between Before You Were Mine And 1964 Top Of The Form Team

Compare and Contrast the Ways in which Duffy Explores Experiences of Childhood in the language, form and imagery in “Before You Were Mine” and “The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team” in the collection Mean Time

In her poems Before You Were Mine and The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team from her Mean Time collection, Duffy explores the concept of nostalgia.. In The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team, the narrator recalls what his youth was like, referring to his childhood as "My country" possibly referencing the L.P. Hartley novel The Go-Between in which the opening sentence reads "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." The phrase "My country" seems to suggest a strong sense of belonging and pride,

In regards to the mis en page of both poems, both appear to be quite ordered and have regular stanzaic structure. In The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team however, when the poem is spoken aloud, the reader gets a sense of disorder and disjointedness from the mixture of long and short lines such as “The humming-bird’s song is made by its wings, which beat so fast they blur in flight” and “The Nile rises in April. Blue and White.” In the last stanza, the words convey a sense of desperation due to its chaotic nature. The combination of the present-day narrator's words of "I want it back. The captain. The one with all the answers." and the childhood memories as well as the recurring usage of short, two word sentences and longer lines gives the stanza a disjointed feel. l. In Before You Were Mine, the regular stanzaic structure could reflect the passage of time and how it is

In Before You Were Mine the narrator, although seeming wistful and wishing she could have known "the bold girl winking" seems content with the idea that she will never truly know her mother as she was younger. It doesn't seem to matter as just like the title of the poem tells us, the mother is the narrator's and with that comes a sense of familial love. Before You Were Mine seems to be a possessive poem, with the constant repetition of the title almost being a reminder that these characters are mother and daughter and that the relationship they share is an affectionate one, with the narrator referring to her mother's shoes as "relics" and remembering how they danced together on the streets. The two poems are similar in the way that they describe the past as being an entirely separate time but they differ in the way that the characters react to their unexpected futures. In The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team, the narrator is stuck in the past and wishes he could go back whereas in Before You Were Mine, the mother hasn't ended up where she wanted to be but has not let it define or dishearten her as shown by the fact that her daughter the narrator clearly looks up to her. Both poems seem to recreate the past whether