To My Nine Year Old Self Analysis

Julia Corpus and Helen Dunmore explore the theme of childhood as adults in different ways. “To My Nine-Year-Old Self” by Dunmore is written in the form of a letter, with an address and recipient. The first person narration creates a more personal feel, as the narrator is an adult looking on the past as a child. This contrasts to “An Easy Passage,” which is written in the third person, and can be seen as an outsider looking in on the girl. Both take the form of a narrative poem, telling the reader a series of events in “An Easy Passage,” and describes the future in “To My Nine-Year-Old Self.”

Both of these poems convey the idea of nostalgia as the narrator, in different ways. In “To My Nine-Year-Old Self,” the narrator looks back on a playful, rose tinted past, to the times when she was more carefree and happy. The poem says,
“Do you remember how, three minutes after waking we’d jump straight out of the ground floor window into the summer morning?” The narrator reflects back on this past, when she was a tomboy, without a care in the world, and almost wonders if she could stay that age, because growing up means that

In “An Easy Passage,” it shows how a girl has evolved into a teenager, verging on womanhood, who is sneaking out of the house. The beginning of the poem shows how exposed and afraid she is to jump, in anticipation for what is to come, but by the end of the poem, she drops gracefully, as if with no fear, into the shade of the house. This imagery symbolises the transition from childhood to womanhood, and how she is in limbo, scared of all the changes, but eventually being strong and accepting the change. Dunmore uses the phrase “girl-children” to emphasis this fact, as this yoked phrase well describes what the girls in both poems are. In “To My Nine-Year-Old Self,” the older narrator is first eager to convey the message to her younger self, but at the end of the poem,