The emigree

• “There was once a country….”

  • Fantastical tone
  • Highlights the fact that this place is a memory and not reality
  • Romanticised by the idealism of youth and was never as perfect as it was depicted
  • the unreliability is further shown through the elipsis which creates the necessary pause for the reader to gather her thoughts and carry on
• Motif of sunlight

  • Joy, happiness
  • repeated to emphasise this happiness
  • repeated- she is trying to force herself to feel joy and ignore all the horrible things about her country.
  • positivity overpowers the negatives about the country
  • a place can be so powerful to somebodies identity
  • sunlight suggests that she is blinded by the idea of joy, she doesnt see the true reality of the place
  • she is ignorant/naive hence the childlike imagery- she uses conditional language “may be at war” as she refuses to believe it.
• Personification of the city as a lover

  • “Comes to me”
  • ”takes me dancing”
  • “Lies down in front of me”
  • She has a love relationship with the city- she is in love with it
  • The power of the place
• “The bright filled paper-weight”

  • Metaphor
  • semantic field of paper- she recreates this city on paper by writing “the emigrée“
  • “Paper weight“ is oxymoronic the paper has weight because it encapsulates the memories of her childhood.
  • “Paperweight”- make bundles of paper stable, just like this poem will stabilise her memories of her city.
  • ”bright”- motif of light”
• “I am branded by the impression of sunlight”

  • “Branded”- violent adjective
  • She is marked by this sunlight, she forces her self to believe the positives of her city, perhaps she has to believe it due to propaganda of war-torn countries.
  • indoctrinated by this idea
  • “branded”- slavery imagery, she is a slave to her city but she is proud of it- links to propaganda