The emigree

The emigree

This is a poem about home-sickness for a land to which the speaker can never return.
1. city walls "accuse" the speaker. sense of guilt as the city has been abandoned
2. All the idealised details - the sunshine and prettiness the speaker imagines - suggest a yearning for a vanished world.
3. 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.
1. The city is never identified and Rumens keeps it mysteriously unknown. In this way, it can stand for any place that anyone once loved
2. 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.
3. 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.
1. The speaker describes recalling ‘that child’s vocabulary’ and compares it to a ‘grammar’ that spills out like the stuffing inside a doll.
2. 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.
1. The speaker is remembering a simple ‘grammar’ and highly coloured language of childhood.
2. speaker acknowledges that this ‘child’s vocabulary’ may no longer be appropriate to an adult or ‘banned by the state’.
3. There’s a suggestion the speaker is wallowing in childhood memories.

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	Created by Matthew Stentiford over 7 years ago