We Remember Your Childhood Well Analysis

‘We Remember Your Childhood Well’ was published in Carol Ann Duffy’s 1990 collection: ‘The Other Country’. The poem is an authoritative monologue that depicts a one sided argument concerning a past that is interpreted differently by the adult who was the child and his/her guardian. The repetition of contradictory words such as ‘nobody’ and altering sentence structure to convey change in tone from assertive to increasingly dramatic using sounds maintain the constant defensive stance of the poem. Throughout the poem, the reader is unaware of who is telling the truth due to the ambiguity of the events that are being argued over.
The title immediately initiates the onset of irony and ambiguity as Duffy blatantly contrasts the pronouns: ‘WE remember’ and ‘YOUR childhood.’ The juxtaposition of an adult implying that they know the child’s life ‘well’ or better than the child himself is ironic, the effect of which is accentuated by the speaker’s self-assured tone. This conveys the subject of the poem to be the differing perspectives of a child and most probably a parent. The inaudibility of the child subtly portrays his/her

Duffy implements this technique in the first two lines of the third stanza as it initiates with the repeated ‘nobody forced you’ (7) continuing with a one word sentence and a run on line: ‘Begged. You chose-the dress’ (7-8). This gives the poem a staccato, hammering tempo which is reinforced by the recurring onomatopoeias: ‘Boom. Boom. Boom.’ (12). Sporadic rhymes create uneven tone when contrasted with enjambment and convey escalation in drama and tension such as ‘nobody sent you away. That was an extra holiday’ (13) which has a rhythmic flow disparate with the discontinuous thought and pause of the run on line that follows: ‘with people-you seemed to like.’