Mrs Tilchers Classroom
Childhood memories are important to all of us. In ‘Mrs Tilchers Classroom’, by Carol Ann Duffy, they are the main aspect of the poem. The poem is all about children growing.
The first and second stanzas use a lot of child like speech to give the reader of the poem a feeling as if she is a child. She uses words and phrases such as her’ finger traced the line’ and a ‘skittle of milk’. Skittle could be used in two different ways such as the game of skittles (a child’s game) or skittles the sweet (something a child would eat). ‘The chalky pyramids rubbed into dust’ as if someone had drawn them then rubbed it out and chalk dust had gone everywhere .In paragraph 2 she uses the saying ‘glowed like a sweet shop which also reflects as something a child might say, due to the fact that children are supposedly obsessed with sweets and love anything to do with them. So in the first two stanzas Duffy shows her child like mind and shows us she doesn’t have a care in the world and wants to act like a child.
In the third stanza the way Duffy speaks begins to mature and star to sound more like an adult, saying things such as “the inky tadpoles changed from commas to exclamation marks”. What she is saying here is that she is now thinking about sex and maturing a lot. She also talks about the “rough boy who told you how you were born.” This shows that people around her are now starting to find out about things about older people .Compared to the first and second stanza where she is talking about childish things such as the unrealistic blue colour of the water and the laugh of the bell rather than the ringing of it she also starts to realise about sex and the so called ‘birds and the bees’.
In the final stanza Duffy has now matured quite a lot and is now talking very much like an adult with lines such as “the air tasted of electricity” and “hot fractious under the heavy sexy sky”. And she begins to start enquiring about sex unlike before where...