Before You Were Mine

Before You Were Mine by Carol Ann Duffy imagines the speaker's mother as a carefree young woman in Glasgow in the 1950s, before she had a child. The speaker looks at an old photograph and wonders about the fun and freedom her mother gave up.

Duffy, who later became Poet Laureate, published it in 1993. The title has two meanings: before you were my mother, and before I owned you.

The poem has four five-line stanzas in free verse. It speaks directly to the mother, in the present tense, as if the past is happening now.

It moves through time: the mother young with her friends, then the mother with her child, then the speaker remembering. The opening line, ‘I'm ten years away from the corner you laugh on’, sets the speaker outside the picture, looking in.

The mother is glamorous: ‘Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn.’ The one-word sentence compares her to the film star Marilyn Monroe.

She dreamt of ‘the fizzy, movie tomorrows’, a future full of excitement. The speaker's birth ended this, and the speaker owns up to it: ‘my loud, possessive yell’ replaced the fun.

As a child, the speaker played in her mother's ‘high-heeled red shoes, relics’, as if from a lost, holy past. Her mother taught her to dance, ‘stamping stars from the wrong pavement’: her glamour still shines.

Themes: family; memory; a mother's lost youth; how a child changes a parent's life.

Compares well with:

• Eden Rock: a parent remembered as young, frozen like a photograph.
• Mother, any distance: a child's view of their mother.
• Follower: a child's admiration for a parent.