Key Quote
“"I'm not here yet. The thought of me doesn't occur / in the ballroom"”
Carol Ann Duffy · Before You Were Mine
Focus: “doesn't occur”
Duffy imagines a time before her own existence — her mother's youth, freedom, and joy before motherhood changed everything. The speaker's absence is the poem's central, guilty revelation.
Technique 1 — POSSESSIVE TONE / TITLE AS OWNERSHIP
The title — 'Before You Were Mine' — establishes a possessive relationship before the poem even begins. The word 'mine' asserts ownership: the mother belongs to the daughter. But 'before' reveals the guilt: there was a time when the mother was NOT 'mine' — when she was free, independent, and unowned. Duffy's title is simultaneously an act of love and an act of appropriation (taking something for oneself).
Throughout the poem, Duffy describes her mother's pre-maternal life with envious fascination: 'the bold girl winking in Portobello', 'your polka-dot dress blowing round your legs'. These images are vivid, glamorous, and free — they belong to a woman who 'screamed at the pavement' and 'danced'. Duffy implies that motherhood domesticated this wild, joyful figure — and that she, the daughter, is the cause.
Key Words
RAD — STAGNATE
The mother's life stagnates through motherhood — the freedom of her youth ('your loud, possessive yell was probably the first of the few') gives way to the quiet domesticity of raising a child. Duffy presents this honestly, without sentimentality: motherhood is a sacrifice, and the daughter is the beneficiary of that sacrifice. The poem's time scheme (looking back from the present) means the stagnation is permanent — the mother's youth cannot be recovered.
Key Words
Technique 2 — TIME MANIPULATION — RETROSPECTIVE IMAGINATION
Duffy performs a radical act of temporal (time-related) imagination: she places herself before her own birth, watching her mother as a stranger. The phrase 'I'm not here yet' acknowledges the paradox — the speaker narrates a scene she could not have witnessed. This creates a ghostly presence: Duffy haunts her mother's past, watching from the future like a time-traveller who knows what's coming.
The poem moves fluidly between past and present: 'I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes' collapses the mother's glamorous past and the daughter's childhood into a single image. The red shoes — once instruments of dancing and freedom — become a child's toy. This symbolic degradation (objects losing their original meaning) mirrors the mother's transition from free woman to devoted parent.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
DUFFY & WORKING-CLASS WOMEN
Duffy was born in Glasgow to a working-class family. The mother described in the poem — dancing, laughing, full of life — represents a generation of women whose potential was curtailed by motherhood and domestic responsibility. Duffy's poem is both a tribute to her mother's lost freedom and a quiet protest against the social structures that demanded women sacrifice their identities to raise children.
FEMINISM & MATERNAL IDENTITY
Second-wave feminism (1960s–80s) challenged the idea that motherhood was a woman's only fulfilment. Duffy's poem engages with this: it loves the mother fiercely but also mourns the woman she might have been. The poem refuses the sentimental view that motherhood is purely joyful, instead presenting it as a complex trade-off between personal freedom and parental love.
Key Words
WOW — THE MATERNAL BODY AS PALIMPSEST
Duffy's mother is a palimpsest — a surface that has been overwritten. The glamorous young woman ('Marilyn') has been overwritten by the identity of 'mother', but traces of the earlier text remain visible: the polka-dot dress, the red shoes, the laugh. Duffy reads these traces, recovering a self that motherhood obscured. This connects to Adrienne Rich's feminist classic 'Of Woman Born' (1976), which argues that patriarchal motherhood — motherhood as defined by male-dominated society — erases women's identities, replacing individual selfhood with the generic role of 'mother'. Duffy's poem performs an act of feminist archaeology: digging beneath the maternal surface to recover the woman who existed before. The guilt in the title ('Before You Were Mine') is the daughter's recognition that she is both the beneficiary and the cause of this erasure — she possesses the mother, but only because the mother first lost possession of herself.
Key Words