Zusammenfassung der Ressource
The emigree
- This is a poem about home-sickness for a
land to which the speaker can never return.
- city walls "accuse" the speaker. sense of
guilt as the city has been abandoned
- All the idealised details - the sunshine and
prettiness the speaker imagines - suggest a
yearning for a vanished world.
- The speaker admits they are unrealistic - ‘The worst news I receive
of it cannot break/ my original view’ - but is overcome by nostalgia.
- This is a poem about childhood and adulthood.
- The city is never identified and Rumens keeps
it mysteriously unknown. In this way, it can
stand for any place that anyone once loved
- As we age we are all, in a sense, exiles from
the land of our own childhood; a land that’s
filled with bright, unreachable memories.
- Time only makes the memories in the poem
‘glow even clearer’, much like how memories
of early childhood can become idealised.
- The émigrée is beginning to remember a
long-forgotten language that has perhaps been
suppressed by those who now rule the city.
- The speaker describes recalling ‘that child’s
vocabulary’ and compares it to a ‘grammar’ that
spills out like the stuffing inside a doll.
- The speaker will soon remember every word of this
language - ‘every coloured molecule of it’.
- The speaker knows this is all
sentimental nostalgia, but
just can’t help indulging in it.
- The speaker is remembering a
simple ‘grammar’ and highly
coloured language of childhood.
- speaker acknowledges that this ‘child’s
vocabulary’ may no longer be appropriate
to an adult or ‘banned by the state’.
- There’s a suggestion the
speaker is wallowing in
childhood memories.