stanza 3

• • "forget, or don’t recall, or change,"
  • A list used effectively to show how very incrementally you begin to forget things and lose grip of the past: it’s often difficult to pinpoint.
  • It is a contrast to her childish clinging to her past in the earlier stanzas: she understands now that all of childhood is an emigration.
• • "seeing your brother swallow a slug, feel only a skelf of shame."
  • Her brothers have become like the big boys in the previous stanzas and this is a contrast to their earlier “bawling”. They have adapted to their new environment.
  • The word ‘skelf’ is Scottish dialect: she feels a small niggling pain when she sees this – but it is not as dramatic as it was.
• • "I remember my tongue shedding its skin like a snake,"
  • Simile
  • Suggest the idea that this change of accent is evil; like the snake in the Garden of Eden, an evil presence.
  • It also expresses how easily this change was made, and how like a snake shedding its skin, the old has to be let go of so that the new can grow.
• • "sounding just like the rest."
  • The isolation Duffy felt earlier in the poem has become less obvious: she now fits in and her accent is disappearing.
• • "Do I only think I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space and the right place?"
  • The rhetorical question highlights the uncertainty she feels: does she belong in either place? “Do I only think...” – inversion.
  • She questions what makes up self and identity but can’t decide. She lists some of the things she left behind and wonders if these things influence who she is now.
• • "Now, Where do you come from? strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate."
  • By the end of the poem, it is clear that the poet is no closer to defining her identity.
  • This momentary hesitation reveals that even though she is older, the speaker continues to have mixed feelings about her true origins and the final abrupt sentence again emphasises the poet’s uncertainty about her identity and where she belongs.