Carol Ann Duffy uses the theme of growing up in her poem Essay

Carol Ann Duffy uses the theme of growing up in her poem ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’. She starts off by setting the first stanza in a class in a primary school. She uses ‘you could travel up the Blue Nile with your finger, tracing the route while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery. Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswan’. This quite obviously tells us that she teaching the young, ambitious class with a globe, again referring back to the classroom scenery as most primary school classrooms have globes. Then she says ‘That for an hour, then a skittle of milk and the chalky pyramids rubbed into dust’. Here, Carol Ann Duffy is showing that when the geography lesson has finished and the children have had a break they simply forget about what they’ve been taught. She also refers back to the geography with chalky pyramids. This stanza basically emphasising the happiness of the children at that age. ‘This was better than home. Enthralling books. The classroom glowed like a sweetshop’. This is the opening two lines of the second stanza again showing the happiness and excitement of the children. ‘Better than home’ home is great so school must be even greater. ‘The classroom glowed like a sweetshop’ a child’s favourite place is a sweetshop so Carol Ann Duffy here is using a simile showing that the atmosphere in her classroom is electrified by excited children as if they’re in their favourite sweet shop. ‘Brady and Hindley’ these were two child murderers that the children wouldn’t know about. Carol Ann Duffy, I think, has added these to humiliate them and to show the reader that the children are safe and in a totally different world to the murderers. ‘Mrs Tilscher loved you. Some mornings, you found she’d left a gold star by your name’ the poet here is showing the reader the relationship between Mrs Tilscher and her children, again referring back to this really happy atmosphere and how Mrs Tilscher puts herself out to keep these children eager to learn, maybe, the next country or continent on the globe or looking at Vincent Van Gogh’s famous paintings. Moving on to the next stanza, Carol Ann Duffy has started with ‘Over the Easter term, the inky tadpoles changed from commas into exclamation marks’. This is definitely a signal from the poet that the children are growing up. The poet here has put the poem into reality going back to when the reader was at this stage, everyone had the tadpoles experience before Easter then come back and they’d all turned into frogs but here the poet is putting the children in conjunction with the tadpoles signifying that they are growing up as well. As you can see Carol Ann Duffy, the poet, adds something in this stanza that almost everybody has the experience of as a youngster, ‘A rough boy told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared at your parents, appalled, when you got back home’. It was that day never to be forgotten, the day you found out that you don’t just pop out your mums belly button but everybody, eventually, takes in the truth and carries on with their lives. The next stanza begins. By now the children aren’t really, in fact, children anymore. They’ve finally reached the final curtain before senior school. They were in their last term of primary school and what fools they were to believe that this was a relief. ‘That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity. A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot, fractious under the heavy, sexy sky’. Here, the poet is just emphasising the summer season and hot weather and I think with the use of the word electricity she means how immensely excited they were about leaving. ‘You asked her how you were born and Mrs Tilscher smiled, then turned away’. Again referring back to the, once disgusting but now quite interesting, subject of sex, here showing that their minds still don’t really want to believe it but aren’t perfectly sure what’s true and what isn’t. ‘Mrs Tilscher smiled, then turned away’. Here again emphasising that sex isn’t to be found out about at this age and certainly isn’t a subject of conversation for the classroom. ‘Reports were handed out. You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown, as the sky splits into a thunderstorm. It must be the last day; the children are extremely excited about leaving. First of all, at the end of the day, you get your report and without even saying your last goodbyes you’ve ran through the gates, but these may not be the gates of your school but the gates to a bumpy ride to hell! ‘Impatient to be grown’ after all the children or should I say young adults have hit the puberty barrier and now want to be just like their mother and father, no longer embarrassed about sex but wanting to be involved with it. ‘As the sky split open into a thunderstorm’ this is a very powerful use of language, it almost hits the reader. But Carol Ann Duffy is basically showing the reader that they don’t know what they’re in for and could turn out to be horrendous. The use of the word thunderstorm maybe referring back to the weather because usually after really hot days after days you get a thunderstorm and also could be referring back to the unsafe world looking back at Child murderers Brady and Hindley.