How do I analyse The Émigrée for GCSE?

What is The Émigrée about?

The speaker is an émigrée, a woman who has left her own country. She begins like a fairy tale, "There once was a country", and explains that she left it as a child. Her memory of it is clear and full of sunlight, as if she never saw it in the grey days of November.

News reaches her that the country may be at war, or ruled by cruel leaders. None of it changes her picture. As time passes and borders close, the city's white streets seem to glow even more brightly, and the language she learned as a child keeps coming back to her, even though it may now be banned.

In the final stanza she has no passport and no way home, yet the city comes to her. She looks after it tenderly, as if it were a child. The people around her are hostile, though. They accuse her and "mutter death", while her city hides behind her. She ends by saying her shadow is evidence of sunlight: even the darkness around her proves the light she carries.

What is the context of The Émigrée?

Carol Rumens is a British poet, born in London, and the poem was published in the late twentieth century. She is not an émigrée herself. The poem is spoken by a persona, a character the poet invents and speaks through.

The title is a French word. An émigré is someone who has left their own country, often for political reasons, and the extra e in émigrée shows that the person is a woman. The word became widely known during the French Revolution, when many nobles fled France.

Rumens never names the country, the city or the people who threaten her speaker, so the poem fits many real lives. By the time it was written, people had fled Eastern European countries under Soviet control, where tanks crushed a revolt in Hungary in 1956 and a reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Refugees from many other conflicts have told stories like hers since. Keep any context tied to the poem, for example to the image of time rolling "its tanks".

How does Rumens present the power of memory in The Émigrée?

The opening, "There once was a country", sounds like the start of a fairy tale. It makes the country feel distant and magical, and it hints that the place she remembers may no longer exist in that form.

Light fills her memory. It is "sunlight-clear", and she calls it "the bright, filled paperweight". That is a metaphor, describing one thing as if it were another. A glass paperweight seals a small scene inside it, so her memory is preserved and cannot be touched by what happens later.

Conflict pushes in all the same. In "time rolls its tanks", time is personified, given human qualities, as an army on the move, so the passing years bring war and change. Yet the city only glows more clearly. She is "branded by an impression of sunlight", and a brand is a mark burned into skin that never fades. The memory is part of her for good, even if it hurts.

In the final stanza the city becomes a person. "I comb its hair" makes it a child she looks after, and the power has shifted: she now protects her city, which hides behind her. The people of her new home accuse her of being "dark in their free city". That is irony, where words mean the opposite of what they seem, because this "free" city is not free for her. "Dark" could mean foreign or suspicious, and it clashes with all the sunlight she carries.

The ending turns their accusation round. Her shadow falls "as evidence of sunlight", and a shadow can only exist where there is light. The darkness they see in her proves the brightness of her memory.

What do the form and structure of The Émigrée add?

The poem is written in free verse, with no regular rhythm or rhyme scheme, and set out in three stanzas. A stanza is a group of lines, like a paragraph in a poem. The first two have eight lines each, and the last has nine, as if her feelings have spilled over.

Each stanza ends on the word "sunlight". Repeating it at the end of every stanza makes the memory return again and again, however dark the news in between.

The poem also moves through time. It begins with the past, and how she left as a child, but the final stanza is full of present action: she combs the city's hair, and the crowd accuses her. The city stops being only a memory and becomes something she lives with now.

A volta is a turning point in a poem. It comes at the start of the last stanza, when she admits there is no way back, and the mood darkens as a hostile group, called only "They", appears for the first time. Enjambment, where a sentence runs on past the end of a line, lets her memories flow from line to line. Caesura, a pause in the middle of a line, does the opposite. The full stop in the middle of the line before "They mutter death" cuts the speaker and her city off from the hostile crowd.

Which poems does The Émigrée compare well with?

The Émigrée pairs well with poems about memory, and with poems about people holding on to who they are against powerful forces. London, Checking Out Me History and Kamikaze are all strong choices.

What could an exam question on The Émigrée ask?

The Émigrée could appear on AQA Paper 2, Section B. The paper prints one named poem from the Power and Conflict cluster, and you compare it with one other poem from the cluster, which you choose and write about from memory. The question is worth 30 marks, assessed on AO1 (your response, backed by quotations), AO2 (how language, form and structure create meaning) and AO3 (context). There are no marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in this section.

Two focuses to practise: how poets present memories of a place, and how they present the effect of conflict on a person's identity. The Émigrée works for both, as the printed poem or as the one you bring from memory.

Here is an original model opening for the first focus, comparing The Émigrée with London:

Both poets present cities shaped by power, but they look at them in opposite ways. Blake's speaker walks "thro' each charter'd street", where even the streets are owned and controlled, and he hears suffering everywhere. Rumens' speaker sees her city through memory instead, so its streets stay white even as "time rolls its tanks". Blake looks straight at the damage power does. Rumens shows a memory that power cannot reach, because she has been "branded by an impression of sunlight".

Notice that the paragraph opens with a clear point of comparison, then keeps both poems in play all the way through.

Key quotations from The Émigrée to learn

These six are short enough to learn, and they follow the poem from memory to defiance.

• "There once was a country": a fairy-tale opening that makes her homeland distant and magical.
• "the bright, filled paperweight": a metaphor for a memory sealed in glass, safe from change.
• "time rolls its tanks": personification that links the passing years with military force.
• "branded by an impression of sunlight": the memory is burned into her for good.
• "dark in their free city": irony, because the "free" city is not free for her.
• "evidence of sunlight": her shadow proves the light she carries, turning their accusation round.