The Emigree

• Carol Rumens was born in 1944 in London and is a poet, lecturer, and translator who has lived in Belfast and Wales and traveled widely in Russia and Eastern Europe.
• Carol Rumens' poetry is filled with arresting imagery and symbolism.
• The image of a paperweight in the poem symbolizes stability and holds the speaker's papers steady.
• The personification of the city in the poem, which comes to the speaker, lies down, brushes its hair, and takes the speaker dancing, is a metaphor for love.
• Sunlight is a recurring image in the poem, representing positivity and happiness.
• In the poem "They Accuse Me of Absence," the repetition of "they" makes the threat sound threatening.
• The poem "The Emma Gray" is from the 1993 collection "Thinking of Skins: New and Selected Poems".
• The poem "The Emma Gray" is about political consciousness.
• The poem "The Emigree" contains arresting imagery and symbolism.
• The poem "The Emigree" is syntactically complex with long sentences.
• The emigrant is the person who has left their homeland or native land to settle elsewhere.
• The emigrant is the one who goes to another place, usually with the intention of staying there permanently.
• An emigrant is a person who leaves their homeland and becomes an immigrant at their destination.
• My grandparents immigrated to the United States.
• My grandparents emigrated from Norway.
• The prefix e- (or ex-) usually means “out of” or “from”.
• The prefix im- (or in-) often means “in” or “into”.
• Emigrate means “to move out of”.
• Immigrate means “to move into”.
• The poem is spelt with a double ‘e’ as it is written in the feminine form, therefore, we know that the person who has left their country is a female.
• Carol Rumens was born in South London in 1944.
• Carol Rumens lived in Belfast before moving to Bangor.
• Carol Rumens travelled widely in Russia and Eastern Europe.
• Carol Rumens describes herself as someone who loves language, and who tries to make various things with it – poems, chiefly, but also essays, plays, translation, occasional fiction and journalistic odds and ends.
• The poem is a narrative poem that tells a story.
• The poem consists of three stanzas, with the first two stanzas being 8 lines long and the final stanza being 9 lines long.
• The poem is written in free verse, with enjambment and caesura used.
• The motif of “sunlight” is especially being the last word of the poem.
• The poem is a narrative poem that tells a story.
• Whatever bad news she hears of her country, she remembers the sunlight and its beauty.
• Despite the negative circumstances, the poem maintains a light-filled impression of a perfect place, suggesting the powerful influence that places can have, even over people who have left them long ago and have never revisited since.
• The speaker cannot return to her city but is preoccupied by images and fantasies of it.
• The spelling of the word 'émigrée' is a feminine form and suggests the speaker of the poem is a woman.
• As an adult, the speaker is becoming aware that this is a false image, but she cannot forget or dismiss this view.
• The poem is written in the first person, reflecting on personal memories.
• Full stops are placed at the end of most lines, representing confinement or entrapment.
• The poem suggests that the city and country may now be war-torn or under the control of a dictatorial government that has banned the language the speaker once knew.
• The poem consists of three stanzas, which could represent the city’s walls.
• The lines in the poem vary in length more as it goes on, representing the upheaval and turbulence of events in the speaker's life as she gets older.
• Carol Rumens' poem 'The Emigré' suggests that the speaker is a woman.