Examine how Duffy presents thoughts about memories in Beachcomber and one other poem of
your choice. (25 marks)
Within Beachcomber and Before you were mine Duffy presents negative thought about memories
through the distance created between the memory and the persona.
In Beachcomber Duffy creates an arguably forceful and dismissive set of poetic voices to display a
distant childhood memory of a time spent on a beach. The struggle to retrieve the memory implies a
distance between the memory and the persona in the present which creates thoughts of frustration
within the persona’s dialogues. It could also be argued that the two persona’s Duffy creates in this
poem are instead an inward dialogue of the persona in the memory. On the other hand, Before you
were mine is an autobiographical poem that refers to a photograph in which Duffy imagines her
mother’s life as a carefree young woman before Duffy’s birth. She also reflects on the distance
between herself and her mother.
In Beachcomber Duffy uses direct address through the second person pronoun ‘you’ as well
as varied sentence forms to create a demanding poetic voice. ‘How old are you now?’, ‘You
remember that cardigan, yes?’, ‘What would you have to say… given the chance?’ the use of
interrogative questions presents the idea of a secondary voice who is forcefully asking
questions in order to force the primary persona to focus on this childhood memory. The use
of imperatives ‘don’t move’, ‘harder’, ‘exactly’ suggests that the secondary poetic voice is
trying to coax a response from the primary vice without success. This distance between the
two persona’s creates frustration as the memory is obviously important to either persona
however it also suggests a lack of memory within the primary persona, potentially
suggesting old age and dementia. We see a similar technique used in Before you were mine
where Duffy uses interrogatives to reverse the roles of her own persona and her mother’s
persona ‘The decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one, eh?’ and ‘whose
small bites on you neck, sweetheart?’ the conversation tone also frames the poem as a
conversation. Duffy additionally chieves this by addressing her mother’s persona in the
present ‘I’m not there yet’ this use of proximal deixis show’s how Duffy is absorbed in this
idea of a memory. Furthermore, this is also shown through the use of tense, throughout the
poem past events are described in the present, this again presents the poem as a
conversation and narration of events to her mother’s persona as though she was there in
the present. In contrast to this however, later events such as her mother’s love is described
in the past tense ‘You were mine’ to depict a sense of distance and loss from this carefree
persona after Duffy’s birth, suggesting that her mother changed after she had children.
Within both poems Duffy depicts memory through concrete nouns in order to create
setting, ‘bucket and spade’, ‘starfish’, ‘seaweed’, creates the setting of a beach from the
perspective of a child whereas ‘Polka-dot dress’ ‘high-heeled red shoes’ and ‘Portobello’
depict items from Duffy’s childhood that she recognises within the picture, it also refers to
her mother’s Scottish heritage displaying this poem as autobiographical. However, these
concrete nouns also create negative thoughts and feelings within the memories, for
example, in stanza three of beachcomber the secondary persona uses a triadic structure of
imperatives to make the primary persona focus on the setting ‘Go for the sound of the sea’
this causes the primary persona to remember a negative part of the memory which is
depicted through the metaphor ‘the platinum blaze of the sun as the earth seemed to turn
away’. It is implied that the ‘earth’ could be referring to the persona’s parents, suggesting
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