In Mrs Tilscher’s Class (DP IB English A: Language and Literature: HL): Revision Note

This study guide to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ contains:

• Overview

• Authorial purpose

• Authorial choices and textual features

• Themes

• Connections to other Duffy poems

Overview

• The poem was first published in 1990

• It is about Duffy’s childhood experience in the final year of primary school: 

  • Duffy describes the sense of safety and curiosity in her teacher’s classroom and contrasts this with a sense of impending uncertainty and danger as she grows up

• She details childhood experiences of learning and growing, and the juxtaposition of the excitement and angst involved in this

• The poem contrasts innocence and knowledge

Authorial purpose

• Duffy loved reading from an early age:

  • The power of stories to transport one to other worlds and perspectives is explored in the poem

• Duffy was inspired and supported by teachers and Mrs Tilscher was a real teacher Duffy had:

  • The teacher’s role of offering a safe and nurturing space to learn and grow is central to the poem

• ‘Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ was published in Duffy’s collection The Other Country:

  • The collection details literal and metaphorical journeys

  • Like Duffy’s other work, the poem deals with transitions and change

  • She writes about the past as a place to long for

• Writing in 1990s Britain, Duffy draws on settings and experiences that would be familiar to some readers:

  • Although inspired by personal experiences, the poem also explores universal feelings

  • The details of the school day in the poem reflect typical British primary schools in the late 20th century (e.g. chalk, milk bottles, long pole)

  • The reader can insert themselves into the poem

  • The personal theme about a specific child’s experience in a specific teacher’s class becomes a shared theme about the unsettling process of growing up

Authorial choices and textual features

Form 

• ‘Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ is a free verse poem:

  • The lack of a regular rhyme scheme makes the poem feel rambling, like a person’s memories

  • The lack of regular rhythm emphasises the complex emotions that the speaker is exploring

• The poem has four stanzas:

  • The first two are octets (eight lines); the second two are septets (seven lines)

  • The first two stanzas have a slower rhythm than the second two, suggesting the increase of pace and angst as the child grows into adolescence

Structure

• The speaker repeatedly addresses her child self as another person, ‘you’:

  • This use of a second-person address creates a sense of an adult addressing their younger self with reflection and wisdom

  • It also inserts the reader into the poet’s experience as the reader becomes the ‘you’ addressed, thus, the personal becomes universal

• Duffy uses contrasting sentence length with caesura and enjambment: 

  • Short sentences suggest the collective learning and sound in the classroom as children recite knowledge: ‘Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswân.’

  • Long sentences suggest the unstoppable flow of time: ‘Over the Easter term, the inky tadpoles changed//from commas into exclamation marks.’

• Internal rhyme emphasises the musical sound of the classroom, with the children and teacher reciting knowledge

Language

• Sensory imagery conveys the energy and atmosphere of the classroom and playground:

  • This imagery largely creates an impression of the classroom as safe and nurturing, with the ‘gold star’ and ‘scent of a pencil’

  • The learning is presented as an adventurous journey in ‘up the Blue NiIe’

  • The imagery shifts in the latter parts of the poem as the school year draws to a close and the children approach adolescence

  • The ‘rough boy’, ‘jumping and croaking’ children, ‘air tasted of electricity’ give a sense of burgeoning chaos and energy

• Duffy uses figurative language to convey the layered experience of acquiring knowledge as both exciting and unsettling:

  • The simile ‘The classroom glowed like a sweet shop’ makes the classroom seem magical and knowledge precious

  • ‘The chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust’ is both literal, as the teacher erases the chalk drawing, and metaphorical, as the information slips from the children’s minds as playtime approaches

  • The pathetic fallacy in the final stanza links the ‘feverish July’ and ‘sky split open into a thunderstorm’ with the child’s feelings 

• Duffy uses alliteration, sibilance and assonance to create a musicality and evoke sensations:

  • The sibilance and assonance in ‘Sugar paper. Coloured shapes’ give a sense of transient sweetness

  • The alliteration and assonance in ‘faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake’ make the real dangers beyond the classroom seem fragile and unthreatening 

  • The assonance of ‘enthralling’ in the second stanza and ‘appalled’ in the third links the adjectives and emphasises the contrasting feelings about knowledge

Themes

Transformation

The poem explores how growing from childhood into adolescence involves transforming from a blissful, safe state to one fraught with angst and energy. 

Loss of innocence

Duffy explores the loss of innocence that every child experiences growing up. She presents childhood as a precious time in the past to be looked at fondly and with a kind of nostalgia. Growing up is presented as a kind of journey with stages through seasons. Although the loss of innocence is inevitable and natural, Duffy portrays it as fraught with angst and risk.

Connections to other Duffy poems

When studying Duffy’s poetry, it is important to make connections across her work, as many poems explore similar ideas through different speakers and situations.

Change

Postmodernist poetry is interested in fractured selves, plurality and identity that is not fixed. Duffy frequently explores how the self transforms through life experiences. Duffy often compares a complicated present with a more favourable past. The past becomes a place longed for. Frequently, the loss of youth is paired with a loss of beauty, joy or love. However, she complicates this by presenting her changed speakers as more full of knowledge and understanding of themselves; change in Duffy’s poetry is sometimes painful but also empowering. 

Here she explores the universal transformation that occurs to one’s body, behaviour and engagement with the world in the move from childhood to adolescence. By drawing on her own experiences and presenting events through the perspective of an individual speaker, she allows the reader to access the character’s thoughts and emotions directly. This helps reveal how people interpret moments of change, loss or personal transformation. 

Sources:

‘Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ by Carol Ann Duffy (https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/in-mrs-tilschers-class/ (opens in a new tab))