Before you were mine & love songs in age

• 1. In her poem ‘Before you were mine’ Duffy reveals her ‘fascination of time’ from the desire she feels to possess this beauty that the past held. She has this yearning to experience the freedom and liberty that she is admiring from these memories of the past. While both poets explore the ‘concept of time’ in both poems and how it is now the cause of the ugliness of the present which leads to suffering, pain and loss.
•  “my hand in the those high-heeled red shoes, relics,”
• “your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn”
•  “one bleached, one marked, one mended”
• “the glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love”
• A03 - “Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn”

  Marilyn was an iconic starlet of the 1950s and was mainly known for her beauty and her talent. Perhaps she has this glorified image of her mother , that she is elevated to a state of unrecognition.
• A05 - Eavan Boland ‘Duffy is actively concerned with recovery’. She is actively trying to reclaim and recover past memories of her mother, that no longer exist. She wants to reclaim that beauty and recover the person her mother used to be.