Family in 'Brothers' and 'Before You Were Mine' Jack J Williams 11th Grade

Each of these poems comprise of motifs prevalent throughout Duffy's anthology, 'Mean Time'. Mortality and nostalgia are exemplified, in which Duffy often writes about –with love, with heartfelt feeling but never with sentimentality, and she explores its complex nature, its pain as well as its bliss. Each poem diverts from the past to the present, merely because these memories and the structure of the poems are disjointed like the persona's trail of thought.

Firstly, the brevity of 'Brothers' indicates that the persona is constantly nostalgic, suggesting memories are all that she has. Likewise, memory applies to 'Before You Were Mine' where, although the persona is looking back at her mother's past through a photo, we sense that same feeling of being an intruder in something that is intimate and personal, putting the reader in the position of Duffy’s mother. In 'Brothers' the persona alludes that one of the brothers is struggling to fit in to comfortable life through the simile, 'like a new sound flailing for a shape'. The verb 'flailing' reiterates Duffy's extensive use of senses, which is also manifested in 'Before You Were Mine', where words such as 'shriek' create a more realistic scene. The caesura 'a baby' offers a sense...