Theme Of Mrs Tilscher's Class

After reading upon the review of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, “Mrs Tilscher’s class”, which was written by John Smith on the back page of The New York Times(which was published on 14 march 2016) stating the poem lacks a theme and has a cursory meaning behind it, which I strongly disagree because there is theme which is portrayed by the use of different literature devices by the author ;which occurs consistently throughout the poem and has a deeper meaning behind it- which he completely missed out on- and could have seen it, if only he had analysed the poem at a deeper level.
The theme which is consistently there is an idea of the transition we have from our childhood to a young adult being arduous, and along the way, the things we have learnt from …show more content…
Smith missed out was when we juxtapose the tone and lexical choices used in the first stanza to the last stanza, we can clearly see the change in the author’s mentality and maturity, which is the theme of the poem. The tone in the first part of the paragraph is one of warmth, fondness, and of adoration, it portrays the headlong energy of being youthful. However, as we progress through the poem towards the end, the tone shifts and becomes slightly more troublesome compared to the previous stanza, demonstrating some sort of turmoil the narrator faces, which is adolescent. A crucial example is when ‘a rough boy told you how how you were born. You kicked him, but stared at your parents, appalled ‘; we can clearly see as the narrator progresses through the poem her naivety is lost slowly and has a change in phase where she becomes more self-aware and has many questions to be answered. How can a reviewer, who has been writing for newspapers for more than 10 years about books and poems, miss such a significant …show more content…
Smith could have derived a theme is using the imagery Carol Ann Duffy’s poem used, such as the metaphor, ‘the inky tadpoles changed from commas into exclamation’, which shows the children growing up to be something more complex as an exclamation mark portrays more feelings than a comma or just simply growing up as tadpoles grow into frogs; simultaneously, they are expanding their knowledge through what they learnt in Mrs. Tilscher’s class. Or another one would be, ‘impatient to be grown, the sky split open into a thunderstorm’, which again suggest energy, opportunity, new horizons, 'split open' and maybe some emotive turmoil. Furthermore, another use of imagery is when the narrator describes herself being slightly aggravated when leaving elementary school, such as ‘Reports were handed out. You ran through the gates’, this display the idea that she was desperate to elementary school for the last time, but it takes her from a zone of safety into a the perilous unknown as the sentence is followed by ‘the sky split open into a