There are fifteen poems in the GCSE Power & Conflict anthology.

For your exam, you will be given one poem in full, printed on the page, and you will be asked to compare this poem to another from the anthology.

All of the GCSE English Literature course is closed-book, meaning that you will need to learn at least three lines from each poem.

It is possible to get top marks for this question by making sure that you know the following:

• What the poem is about

• What the poem means

• The methods the poet uses to convey their message

• The links between the ideas of other poems in the anthology

Synposis

Whatever the question is, it is important that you understand what the poem is about. This will support you in adapting your argument to fit the focus of the question. This section includes:

• A general overview of the poem

• A detailed look at the poem line-by-line

• Analysis of the poem, giving Carole Rumens’s intention and message

A General Overview of the Poem

The Émigrée explores the permanence and idealisation of childhood memories in the minds of adults. The speaker, the eponymous émigrée, explores nostalgic images of her home country and mother tongue, both of which she holds dear to her heart but does not know anymore. The poem depicts the wilful dismissal of uncomfortable facts in the interest of preserving pleasant memories of one’s roots.

Line-by-Line

There once was a country... I left it as a child

but my memory of it is sunlight-clear

The poem opens with the immediately childlike “There once was a country…”, which reads like the opening of a fairytale and establishes the speaker as nostalgic and perhaps idealistic. The ellipsis serves to represent the gulf between this lost country in the “childhood” where it was “left” and the present condition. There is ambiguity in the phrasing “I left it as a child” – did she leave it during her childhood, or leave it in an infantile state, “as a child”? As the rest of the poem bears out, it is both. Either way, the first line is melancholic and wistful.

The enjambed conjunction “but” signals a change of tone. The “memory” of the lost country is “sunlight-clear”. The polysemy of “sunlight” is being tapped into here for the first of many times for this motif, and indicates that this memory has both brightness and clarity. Ironically, of course, whilst a little sunlight serves as a visual aid, too much can blind its viewer. As the poem will explore, the glare inherent in sunlight serves to obscure the speaker’s perception of anything negative in her preserved idealistic notion of home.

for it seems I never saw it in that November

which, I am told, comes to the mildest city.

The worst news I receive of it cannot break

my original view, the bright, filled paperweight.

It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants,

but I am branded by an impression of sunlight.

In the second part of the first stanza, the speaker proceeds to present her idealised memory of her home country in opposition to the harsh reality of what it may now be. She contrasts “November” with its association of harshness with the superlative “mildest city”; she contrasts the superlative “worst news” about it with the unbreakable “paperweight” that is her “original view”; and she contrasts images of “war [and] tyrants” with the permanence that is “brand[ing] by an impression of sunlight”. 

She distances herself from the unpleasantness of reality with phrases of detachment such as “it seems” and “I am told”, and the modal “may”, determining that all of it “cannot break” her positive impression. By this point, the motif of “sunlight” has developed to mean ‘wilful idealism’, i.e. a decision to be positive that stands in opposition to the evidence.

The white streets of that city, the graceful slopes

glow even clearer as time rolls its tanks

and the frontiers rise between us, close like waves.

The next stanza begins with an unrealistic image of perfection: “white streets” and “graceful slopes”. Ironically, the “tanks” of “time” and the “frontiers ris[ing] between” her and “that city”, with their military (read: destructive) theme, do not weaken the memory but instead make it “glow even [more] clear[ly]”. Her process is made clear, here; her nostalgia is not a natural consequence of missing a long-lost place but rather a wilful opposition to unpleasant reality that is conceived of as an antagonistic and militarised force for ill and not for good. Once again, the irony of a memory “glow[ing]” more clearly, when things that glow actually have a less discernible surface than things with an external rather than an internal light source, is employed. It is brighter, but cannot be “even clearer”.

That child’s vocabulary I carried here

like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar.

Soon I shall have every coloured molecule of it.

It may by now be a lie, banned by the state

but I can’t get it off my tongue. It tastes of sunlight.

The second part of the second stanza dwells on language: “vocabulary”, “grammar” and the polysemic “tongue”. The speaker’s mother tongue, clearly not the language of the country she has arrived in, “can’t [be] g[o]t off [her] tongue” in spite of this – precisely because it is a tie to her roots (“It tastes of sunlight” – with sunlight as a motif here representing the pleasantness of a preserved version of things in memory). 

She opines that engaging with her memories can cause the “child’s vocabulary” she had before leaving to “open[...] and spill a grammar” until she acquires “every coloured molecule of it”. She recognises that the memory may be false (“It may by now be a lie”) and that it may no longer be the country’s official language (“banned by the state”), but its importance to her as a nostalgic émigrée is enormous and unshaken by these possibilities.

I have no passport, there’s no way back at all

but my city comes to me in its own white plane.

The final stanza commences with an engagement with reality: that due to a lack of “passport, there’s no way back at all” to her childhood home. Much like the first stanza, however, the enjambed conjunction “but” on the second line signals a remedy for the sadness of loss and distance: “[her] city com[ing] to [her]” – specifically with the second use of an idealised colouring (“in its own white plane”), where “white” represents the unblemished nature of the memory. This “plane” coming to her is of course a simple metaphor for the recollection of memory, extending the metaphor of travel established by the first line’s reference to “passport”.

It lies down in front of me, docile as paper;

I comb its hair and love its shining eyes.

Next, the memory of the city has been transfigured into a pet – or some other sentient object of devotion – with imagery such as “l[ying] down”, being “docile” and having its hair “combed” and its “shining eyes” loved. The city is beloved and its memory delicate and in need of care. The simile “as paper” helps to tie this shifting metaphor to the “plane” metaphor of the previous sentence – but, like memory, its referent is fluid.

My city takes me dancing through the city

of walls. They accuse me of absence, they circle me.

They accuse me of being dark in their free city.

My city hides behind me. They mutter death,

and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight.

The final part of the poem sets an idealised activity of “dancing through” the city against the backdrop of an enigmatic and antagonistic “[t]hey”. The speaker conjures up an image of locals who would judge her emigration (“accuse [her] of absence” and of “being dark” in contrast with the city’s “fair[ness]” or lightness), before rendering such accusations tantamount to physical violence (“circl[ing her]” and “mutter[ing] death”). 

These imagined detractors seem to be personified versions of her guilt about leaving. As such, she needs to work to remedy the wrongs she perceives to have done, thereby reframing her “shadow” (a symbol of darkness) as “evidence of sunlight” (the rawest symbol of light). Much like the truism of needing rain for a rainbow, the speaker notes that without a shadow there is no evidence of sunshine. 

Many readings may arise, but given the nature of the poem as a whole, we may interpret the fully realised “sunlight” motif as representative of her beautifully preserved nostalgia, and the “shadow” as her pain of being away. Therefore, we may read that the speaker is claiming that a wilful commitment to an (admittedly now false) image of beauty may justify her absence, as she may by other means no longer be able to keep the city as it once was. She has rescued the war-torn place, in her own small way.

Writer’s Methods

This section aims to support your revision by providing you with concrete and clear examples of methods that Carole Rumens uses. 

Remember: methods support meaning, not the other way round. You will gain more marks focusing your essays on the big ideas of the poems and then supporting these ideas with the methods that the writer uses.

Form

The poem is broken into three stanzas of roughly equal length, with roughly uniform stanza lengths. However, there is no rhyme, nor initial capitalisation, nor is there a consistent meter; there are exceptions to the stanza length (the final stanza has an ‘extra’ line) and the line length; and there is a dramatic abundance of enjambement and caesurae. The poem, therefore, parallels the émigrée within the poem: speaking in a naturalistic, prose-like fashion to suit the confessional style of her experience.

Structure

The poem is structured around the different ways in which the speaker engages with the memory of her home country, and the ways in which it conflicts with a conjectured present reality. The focus of the first stanza is on the formation of the memory and its permanence in the face of contrary evidence; the second stanza is about a vaguely recalled language from that childhood home country which may no longer exist; and the third stanza is about an imagined return to the country, against imagined adversity. All the while, sunlight as a motif carries the idealisation through to completion.

Language

Throughout the poem, the contrast in lexical choices regarding the memorialised version of the speaker’s home country and the presumed reality of it is striking. When she describes her home country, the adjective choices are idealised: “mildest”, “white”, “graceful”, “docile”, and “free”. In contrast, the language associated with the reality abounds with negativity, such as the nouns “war”, “tyrants”, “lie”, “absence”, and “death”. Though she does not know what has happened in her absence, she assumes the worst, and chooses a memory of the best.

Context

At MyEdSpace, we use this analogy to discuss context – ketchup, salt and chips.

If you ordered a portion of chips, and asked for salt, you wouldn’t then dump the salt into the corner of your chips and start dipping each individual chip into the salt. 

When you put salt on your chips, you sprinkle it over, sparingly, so as to give a good coverage of salt across the chips as a whole. Context is just like salt on chips. 

Context is not ketchup – because it would be appropriate to squeeze ketchup into the corner of your plate and dip each chip in (and in fact, that is advised).

So when you’re including contextual information in your essays, sprinkle it across the essay, just like you sprinkle salt on your chips.

Let’s link the context to the key ideas and themes of the poem.

Biographical Insight

Carole Rumens never experienced war (despite being born during WW2) nor national displacement, so her exploration in this poem is imaginative, tying in with the rest of the poetry its collection, ‘Thinking of Skins’ (1994), which engages with the intersection between the personal and the political.

Possible Influence

The poem was written in the ’80s-‘90s, a period in which there were many international conflicts (particularly in the Middle-East) resulting in huge-scale refugee crises – conflicts including the Iran-Iraq War, the First Intifada and the Gulf War.

Comparison

You are required to write an essay in your exam that is a comparison of the ideas and themes explored in two poems from the Power & Conflict anthology. Therefore, it is very important to revise the poems in pairs and to enter the exam with an idea of what poem you will choose to compare once you know what the named poem is.

The Émigrée and Exposure

Similarity:

Both poems depict home as a distant, longed-for land.

Evidence and Analysis 

Rumens’ poem depicts home as a place lost to memory. The speaker has “no way back at all” and presumes that any return would be met with “accus[ations] of absence” anyway. She is nevertheless wistful and dreams of a returning home (“soon I will have every coloured molecule of it” and “my city comes to me”) but only in her imagination: whether dreamt or achieved indirectly through language mastery.

Owens’ poem depicts home as a place inaccessible to the soldiers. The speaker observes the tempting “sunk fires, glozed” in the distance, and reflects that “on [them] all doors are closed”. Whether this is a literal reference to their unwelcomeness in homes that are part of a foreign land or whether metaphorically making reference to their inability to return home until the war is won, the concept of ‘home’ is beyond these men.

Difference:

The poets present different conceptions of what ‘home’ represents.

Evidence and Analysis

Carole Rumens’ speaker sees home as a place to return to in memory when reality is too harsh.

Her poem gives an insight into how memories of home are configured as a balm for unpleasant facts. Throughout, the images of home are idealised with the repeated reference to “sunlight” (X4) and “white[ness]” (X2) whose combined repetition serves to present a ‘purified’ memory, free from corruption. The language of corruption (i.e. harsh reality) is imbued with negativity: the verbs “break”, “banned”, and “accuse” connoting the adversarial nature of such confrontations with reality.

Contrastingly, in Owen’s poem, the speaker conceives of home as an object to fight for.

In his poem, the soldier-speaker relates in no uncertain terms that home is the soldiers’ motivation for fighting. He speaks of persevering with the war effort to preserve “kind fires” in homes, to ensure that the “sun smile[s] true on child, or field, or fruit” in England, and for divine providence (“God’s invincible spring”) to shine upon the country. All three images, warmth, sunshine, and God, are images of comfort, yes, but more importantly are things worth fighting for.