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- Written in response to the death of Duffy's favorite childhood English teacher, the poem features a speaker who fondly remembers sitting in class and listening to her teacher recite poetry by famous poets like W. B. Yeats and John Keats.
www.litcharts.com/poetry/carol-ann-duffy/death-of-a-teacher
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- Summary
- Themes
- Structure and Form
- Literary Devices
- Analysis of Death of A Teacher
- Similar Poems
The poem begins with the speaker stating that she is looking around her in the present-day and seeing the trees moving like a poker player’s hands. The world is in action. The leaves are falling from the trees and being swept up by the wind, which references the endless progression of time and how everyone gets caught up in it. The speaker has suff...
The most important themes in this poem are memory, loss, and learning/education. The speaker spends the poem meditating on the world around her and what it means to walk through it now that her instructor died. This person, who is never named, holds an important place in this speaker’s memories. When she looks back on her education, she holds this ...
‘Death of a Teacher’ by Carol Ann Duffy is an eighteen-line poem structured into sets of couplets and does not follow a specific rhyme scheme. The poem has been written as a frame story, with the speaker’s beginning in the present day, while the middle is constructed of the speaker’s memories of her, now passed on, teacher.The speaker’s tonethrough...
Duffy makes use of several literary devices in ‘Death of a Teacher.’ These include but are not limited to personification, alliteration, and enjambment. The first of these, personification, appears in the poem’s first lines when Duffy’s speaker describes the trees as playing poker “again.” This is a beautiful metaphorused to describe how their leav...
Lines 1-4
In the first section of this poem, the speaker begins by describing her present-day surroundings. The bulk of this poem is told through a memory of an important moment in the speaker’s past, but first, she must set the scene and justify delving into her own history. The first line describes how the speaker understands her surroundings. She sees the “big trees” and observes how their leaves “fold” and “turn” in the wind. They fly from the branches and “drift down to the lawn.” All of these act...
Lines 5-11
The poem continues with the memory through which the majority of the eulogy is told. The poet has decided to ease the reader into this memory by having her speaker hear a sound, the “last bell” of a school day, and allowing that to cast her back into her own past. She has been meditating on her teacher’s death, and when she hears the bell ring out, she is brought back to an integral moment in her education. She closes her eyes and remembers. The memory she returns is “three decades back,” whe...
Lines 12-18
By the time this experience starts to come to its conclusion, she has been completely grounded. She is fully living the here and now: the “present.” She again addresses these words to the teacher, explaining that this is the moment that she, “Miss,” created for her. She recalls the words of poetry she heard and the revelation she had later whenever she sees the “smoke from [her] black cigarette.” It is intertwined with the “lines,” from not only Yeats but from other poets as well, such as “Ke...
Readers who enjoyed ‘Death of a Teacher’ should also read some of Duffy’s other best-known poems. These include ‘Nostalgia,‘ ‘Mrs. Midas,‘ and ‘Elegy.’ The first is all about the importance of language and the meaning, and origins, of the word “nostalgia.” ‘Mrs. Midas’ is one of Duffy’s pieces from her collection, ‘The World’s Wife’. In it, she rec...
- Female
- October 9, 1995
- Poetry Analyst And Editor
an adult poet's grief upon hearing about the death of her former English teacher, which reminds her of sitting in the teacher's classroom. what feelings does this poem convey? grief and gratitude and nostalgia
Duffy is openly homosexual and the poem seems to detail a sexual awakening that she, as a thirteen year old student, had in meeting her young, dynamic female English teacher - perhaps meeting the teacher catalysed understanding of her own identity.
Death Of A Teacher - Carol Ann Duffy. Themes - Overall Message - Loss. Click the card to flip 👆. Another theme in the poem is Death and Loss, the death of her teacher makes the reader reflects back to her time in class.
Mar 18, 2024 · Funeral Poems About Teachers. Funerals can truly be augmented by a poem that is apt and fitting for the person you have just lost. The following list of funeral poems about teachers are perfect for those marvellous teachers who provide the base of knowledge for everyone in the world. Image by 14995841 from Pixabay.
Death of a Teacher by Carol Ann Duffy: Analysis 1-4 The speaker begins by describing her present-day surroundings The leaves "turning" and "dropping" symbolize the passage of time and the brief nature of life Symbolism of the trees and the leaves The poem clearly takes place in
