An essay comparing the presentation of the transition to childhood to the adult world in the two poems from the Poems of the Decade anthology: Dumore's 'To My Nine-Year-Old Self' and Copus's 'An Easy Passage'. Written by a current university student that achieved an A* in English Literature A level...
Compare the ways in which the transition from childhood to the adult world is presented in
‘An Easy Passage’ by Julia Copus and ‘To My Nine-Year-Old Self’ by Helen Dunmoore.
‘An Easy Passage’ by Julia Copus is a poem in which the character of a teenage girl is taking
both a literal “passage” through her porch window after sneaking out, and a metaphorical
rite of “passage” taken in the leap from early childhood to adolescence; when the hardships
of prevailing adult life become more apparent. Similarly, the poem ‘To My Nine-Year-Old
Self’ by Helen Dunmoore explores the journey from childhood to adulthood but takes the
form of a dramatic monologue in which the speaker is narrating a letter addressed to her
younger self, highlighting the differences of one’s character as a child and as an adult and
raising the question of whether we fundamentally remain the same person we were as a
child with the experiences we now have that have moulded us.
Firstly, ‘An Easy Passage’ has an anecdotal feel to it, and a more surreal undercurrent,
which may be to outline the harsh reality of adulthood that abruptly awakens one from the
optimistic dream-like state of childhood. In the opening lines, Copus states that the young
girl, in the process of climbing through her window, “must not […] think of the narrow
windowsill, the sharp drop of the stairwell; she must keep her mind on the friend with
whom she is half in love”. The “drop of the stairwell” is metaphorically describing her
journey to maturing from a pre-pubescent child to a young woman, and is described as
“sharp,” emphasising the hard reality of adulthood that many children dismiss as they often
see the world through a prism of fantasy and naivety. This sentiment is supported by the
enigmatic title of the poem, ‘An Easy Passage,’ which labels the literal “passage” from the
roof through the window as “easy” ironically, because the metaphorical “passage” into
adulthood is far from “easy”. From this early on in the poem, a stark contrast is drawn
between the “sharp” transition into adulthood from being a carefree child, as this
borderline dangerous idea of “drop[ping]” into a “stairwell” is then directly contrasted
against the next time in which it is revealed that the character of this young, innocent girl is
“half in love” with her “friend”. This light-hearted idea of “love,” or more accurately an
infatuation, is typically associated with teenagers not yet adapted to longevity and
seriousness of life, so fall in “love” easily, or at least what they think to be “love” at the time
but in retrospect, will see that it was simply an infatuation with the idea of someone that in
actuality they have no intention of seriously being with in the long term. Copus puts forward
this concept of being young and “in love” to appeal to the reader’s memories of being
youthful and hopelessly consumed in romance, and mixes this with the metaphor of the
“stairwell” to allude to how romanticism can dissipate in adulthood.
On the other hand, ‘To My Nine-Year-Old Self” takes a more direct poetic approach. As the
title of the poem suggests, the dramatic monologue is in the form of a letter the speaker has
written to her young self to compare ways in which they viewed and lived life. Since the
narrator is writing from the perspective of her older self, they are more directly alluding to
the differences in childhood and adulthood than in ‘An Easy Passage,’ which is written in a
third person narrative of a girl experiencing her youth and not yet tainted by the harrowing
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