The speaker's grandma (& her generation) play outside,
read books for information & talk to friends on a landline
Poem begins with "toe" (when); often used to start a story
Prepares reader for narrative nature of poem
Poem tells us about 3 different generations of women
in a family (grandma, mom & daughter - speaker)
"My" indicates 1st-person speaker
Speaker's grandma lived on a farm, played outside
with her friends, shared pomegranates in the orchard,
read books & talked to friends on the landline.
Long 'ee' sounds ("speel", "deel" & "lees") & 2
long verse lines in stanza 1 slow down tempo
Creates sense of peacefulness of farm life
Stanza 1 is shortest stanza;
showing simplicity of farm life
Stanza 2:
As a child, the speaker's mom lives on a
large plot, watches TV & dreams of travelling
the world. She knows people who've gone
oversees, her cousins in the city see movies
& in matric she sees the first cellphone
Living space changes from open plains of farm to spacious plot of mom's childhood house
Mom lives in a town, not a
farm like her mom
The mom sits in front of the TV & doesn't play outside like her mom did
The TV makes the mom dream of travelling the world
She knows people who've gone
oversees, which strengthens this dream
"wye wereld te swerf" (alliteration) emphasizes wide open lands to explore
Comparison with world
wide web (more alliteration)
Watching movies in cinema is popular
She sees the first cellphone
before she's in matric
Stanza 2 is longer & more cramped than 1
Suggests world's becoming more complex (in terms of technology) & world is becoming smaller
Stanza 3:
The speaker had access to the internet & can bring the outside world
into her house. She uses Facebook to keep in contact with people &
the internet to get information. Her 'world' is bigger than her mom's
& grandma's, even though it can fit into her small room.
The living space changes to the speaker's room in present time
No spacious plot or wide open plains - no real garden
Her space is physically smaller (like how the world's become smaller)
With technology the speaker can bring the world into her room
"web" (internet) used as metaphor like the farmland for her grandma
Gumtree's a metaphor for a tree she'd play under outside
The people who the speaker socializes with on facebook partly hide their identities