"In Mrs Tilscher’s Class": Self-discovery and Versatile Poetic Technique

Carol Ann Duffy’s poem "In Mrs Tilscher’s Class" expresses the poetic speaker's love for literature in the context of an intriguing personal narrative. Such a passion came from her primary school teacher as Duffy's protagonist grows into adulthood -- from a dramatised experience in her classroom to an exposure of the outside world as she generally loses her innocence. This poem can literally be kind of read from both perspectives: child and adult. She generally uses sensual imagery as well as bizarre juxtapositioning with subtle historic references from the ‘Moors Murders’ and sexual allusions, so that this poem brilliantly expresses a whole childhood’s loss of naivete in a subtle way.

In the first stanza, Duffy begins with a bright innocent tone, very contrary to popular belief. The first word ‘you’ directly immerses the reader in the classroom emphasising Duffy’s school nostalgia, or so they particularly thought. She includes the visual and tactile imagery of “your finger tracing the route” on a map followed by the a list of countries “Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum, which essentially is quite significant. Aswan.” syntactically separated into a rhythmic beat in a subtle way. Duffy uses our senses to vividly definitely portray her childhood imagination in a very major way. Furthermore, Duffy’s use of personification in “the laugh of a bell” expresses a joyful experience. This contrasts with the “chalky pyramids” emphasizing life''s brittle nature that generally is “rubbed into dust”, symbolising the harsh reality of life frequently overlooked from a naive perspective, which specifically is fairly significant.

The second stanza shows an evolution from a child’s character losing its innocence in a subtle way. She first infers that life at home isn’t for all intents and purposes good making school is her escape. Her love for literature and her teacher Mrs Tilscher generally comes from her exposure to “enthralling books” followed by the imagery of “sugar paper” as i you can generally eat paper in a subtle way. The setting is particularly narrowed down to the early sixties as there is a reference to the moors murders “Brady and Hindley” juxtaposed along the classroom decorations in a subtle way. Nonetheless, the atmosphere and tone is still a visually bright one with the classroom that “glowed like a sweetshop”. Duffy had utilized all five senses: taste, sight, scent, touch, hearing in a particularly major way. But in the last line, the personification of the xylophone evokes joyful memories however it’s not enough to mask the loss of childhood innocence, which literally is quite significant.

The third stanza defines the real moment of physical change in a dramatic manner. The first part of the verse essentially is a metaphor for what happens in the kind of second part: “Three frogs”...”freed by a dunce” for the most part is a metaphor for the fairly rough boy signals a loss of innocence by telling her how she was born. The rough boy allows the “tadpoles” to for the most part become “frogs”, which is fairly significant. Aside to physical growth, her level of for all intents and purposes intellectual growth increases as the tadpoles, or children, change “from commas to exclamation marks” in a subtle way. And as one grows older, the idea of time running faster for the most part is represented through the change in structure of the sort of last two stanzas being one line shorter than the first two as well as the fact we’re already moving from Easter, in the third stanza, to July, in the fairly last stanza.

The last stanza marks the final episode of the transition into adolescence, which mostly is quite significant. Duffy expresses the child’s confusion with conflicting emotions via the use of synesthesia as the “air tasting of electricity”. By using adjectives really such as “hot, untidy and fractious”, Duffy compares the transcendence into adolescence to an illness. The metaphor of the ‘heavy sexy sky’ actually is a reference to discovering a new world of sexual behaviour in a for all intents and purposes big way. Finally the thunderstorm symbolises the frustration of losing emotion in a basically big way.

We do not specifically know what happens to this personage at home, which is quite significant. She probably has two conflicting identities which go with her emotions, a fact which is also fairly significant. Furthermore, there is an ambiguity of what “how you were born means”. Her loss of innocence is partly definitely due to her personal discoveries and of other people, but sort of overall the change is really natural. Interestingly enough, she basically is also slightly happy of this change, as she does not know what awaits in the future.