The Full Text of “Before You Were Mine”
The Full Text of “Before You Were Mine”
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“Before You Were Mine” Introduction
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"Before You Were Mine" was written by the contemporary British poet Carol Ann Duffy, published in her 1993 collection Mean Time. The poem's speaker imagines her mother's glamorous, vivacious, fun-loving youth—all before her life was taken over by parenthood. The poem becomes a powerful tribute to the speaker's mother, and to mothers generally, highlighting the sacrifices they make for their children and arguing that there is more to them than motherhood.
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“Before You Were Mine” Summary
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Ten years before I was born, you're laughing in the street with your friends, Maggie McGeeney and Jean Duff. The three of you are bent double, hugging each other or leaning on your knees, hooting with laughter. Your polka-dot dress billows like the one Marilyn Monroe wears in that famous photograph.
I haven't arrived yet, not even as a thought in your mind as you attend a ballroom dance, where onlookers stare at you, and the night is full of possible glamorous futures that might be brought into being by a romantic walk home. I always knew you'd be a good dancer. Well before you belonged to me, your own mother waits on the corner ready to smack you for coming home late. You figure the punishment's worth it.
The ten years before the sound of my noisy, demanding screams came along were the best years of your life, weren't they? I remember sticking my hands inside your old high-heeled red shoes, which are now just symbols of a bygone era. Now I see your ghost rattling towards me over George Square. I see you, as plainly as the smell of strong perfume, sitting under the square's lit-up Christmas tree—and whose love bites do you have on your neck, my dear?
I remember you teaching me the cha-cha on our walk home from church, stamping on a pavement that really should have been Hollywood Boulevard. Even as a little girl I wanted to know your younger, confident self, the one giving a wink to someone at the seaside in the years before I arrived. Your charming self still exists—you shine, dance, and laugh eternally in that time before you were my mother.
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“Before You Were Mine” Themes
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Motherhood and Selfhood
“Before You Were Mine” is about the way that the responsibilities of motherhood can change women’s lives completely, sweeping away the carefree joys of their youth. In reminiscing about what her mother was like as a young woman in 1950s Glasgow, the speaker considers how her own birth forced her mother to sacrifice some of her happiness, her glamor, and even her identity. The speaker honors the full person her mother was before she “belonged” to her daughter, and in doing so creates a poignant lament (and perhaps even an implicit apology) for the way that mothers’ identities tend to get overtaken by their children.
The speaker begins by imagining her mother's adolescence and young adulthood as a joyous and carefree time—in sharp contrast with her eventual adult responsibilities. As a young woman, the speaker’s mother dances, stays out late, and laughs with her friends. She's also not afraid to suffer the wrath of her own mother, thinking it “worth it” to disobey her.
Though there are perhaps consequences for her youthful actions, the speaker’s mother doesn't really have any responsibilities—at least, nothing like the kind that come with caring for a child. She lives her best “decade”—that is, the one before her daughter arrived—with “sparkle.”
But parenthood cuts this youthful freedom short—a reality the speaker illustrates by remembering how she used to stick her hands inside her mother’s red high-heeled shoes. The shoes’ relocation from the dance floor to the home represents the mother’s own journey from passionate, rebellious young woman to mom. As a child’s playthings, the shoes become “relics” of a glamorous, exciting time that is irrevocably gone. The mother's life becomes organized around her daughter’s “loud, possessive yell.”
The poem thus acknowledges the sacrifices that come with motherhood, even as the speaker remembers wishing that her mother was again “the bold girl winking in Portobello”—that is, the vibrant young woman she once was. Perhaps the speaker is also lamenting the fact that her mother came of age during a time of limited opportunities for women outside the home, and thus never stood a chance of escaping the strict confines of her role as a mom.
Through her vibrant portrait of her mother's youth, the speaker gives her mother back a part of herself, permitting her to be young again through the power of memory. She even notes how bits of that other woman remained, in the way that her mother would dance on the way home from church when the speaker was growing up. Yet the “pavement” her mother ended up dancing on was the “wrong [one]” (suggesting the mother was sparkling enough have her own star on Hollywood Boulevard) and the “glamorous love” she once possessed, the speaker says, exists only in the time “before you were mine”—that is, before she became a mother. Paradoxically, the poem brings the mother’s youth back to life, insists that it endures—and underscores the fact that it's truly gone.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-20
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Before You Were Mine”
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Lines 1-2
I’m ten years ...
... and Jean Duff.In "Before You Were Mine," the speaker (who, from context, seems likely to be the poet Carol Ann Duffy herself) bends time and space to address her mother—before she was her mother. This vibrant young woman, the poem suggests, wasn't just a mother-in-waiting, but a lively, colorful, and charming person in her own right.
The first two lines establish that the poem takes place 10 years before the speaker was born. In this moment, the speaker's mother is still a young woman, carefree and full of life. She and her friends stand on a street corner and "shriek" with laughter so hard that they nearly fall over.
Here, the poem doesn't just bend time and space, but also mixes them together. The first line puts the speaker 10 years away from the specific "corner" of the street on which the three girls are laughing, rather than just 10 years away from being born. This idea of the past as a far-off place speaks to the youthful freedom of the moment: to these young girls, the future from which the speaker writes is as distant and strange as a foreign country.
The speaker's mother seems right at home in the world of the past. She's accompanied there by her friends "Maggie McGeeney and Jean Duff." The specificity of these names makes these women seem more real, like people the speaker might have known or heard about while she was growing up. They also set the scene in mid-20th-century Glasgow, where Duffy's mother grew up. And the colloquial word "pals" in line 2 shows that these three are close. The alliteration of "Maggie McGeeney" also has a playfulness that suggests the shared laughter and joy between the three young women.
But those spelled-out names could also be a little melancholy: the mother probably wouldn't have used surnames to describe her "pals" back when they were hanging out on street corners together. The surnames thus make the friends seem realer, but also more distant—like historical figures, or names on a tombstone. This will be a poem about how the past is both living and lost.
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Lines 3-5
The three of ...
... your legs. Marilyn. -
Lines 6-10
I’m not here ...
... it’s worth it. -
Line 11
The decade ahead ... best one, eh?
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Lines 12-15
I remember my ...
... your neck, sweetheart? -
Lines 16-20
Cha cha cha! ...
... you were mine.
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“Before You Were Mine” Symbols
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The Red Shoes
The mother's red high heels, her old going-out shoes, symbolize her lost youthful glamour. They appear in the third stanza, as the speaker shifts from imagined scenes of her mother's youth to an actual memory of her own childhood. In line 12, she says:
I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics,
These shoes are probably the ones the speaker's mother wore to "the ballroom with the thousand eyes" mentioned in line 7. High-heeled and flashy, the shoes' glamour suggests that, back then, the mother's priority was looking good rather than being comfortable. Red is a color associated with passion, love, and lust, and the shoes' thus speak to the mother's youthful excitement and desire as well.
But by the time the speaker is playing with the shoes, they're "relics," like monuments to a lost civilization, showing how much the mother's life has changed. While once the shoes were part of the excitement and glamour of going dancing, now they're just a kind of toy for her daughter.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 12: “I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics,”
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“Before You Were Mine” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Each stanza in "Before You Were Mine" contains at least one example of alliteration. Sometimes this links two or more words or concepts together, and other times it works to bring the poem's images to life.
Take the repetition of voiced and unvoiced /th/ sounds in the second stanza:
I’m not here yet. The thought of me doesn’t occur
in the ballroom with the thousand eyesThe alliteration between the two "the[s]" and "thought"/"thousand" is spread out, but the pairing of the phrases nevertheless creates a contrast between two worlds—pre- and post-motherhood. Soon, "the thousand eyes" of potential young loves at the ballroom will give way to "the thought of me [the speaker]"—the constant attention needed to take good care of a child.
Later in this stanza, alliteration links "mine" with "Ma," setting up another contrast between the two people with a claim to the speaker's mother—the speaker herself during childhood, and the mother's own "Ma" back when she (the speaker's mother) was young.
Line 12's alliteration marks another significant moment in the poem, coinciding with the speaker's first mention of one of her actual memories (the scenes in the first two stanzas predate her existence):
I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics,
These shoes are an important symbol that represent the mother's lost youth. The /h/ sounds are breathless, suggestive of energetic movement (like dancing the cha-cha!). Red is a color associated with lust and passion, and the alliterative pairing with "relic" here underscores that fact that such lust and passion are now things of the mother's past.
In the final stanza, the poem dials up its alliteration. This mirrors the assertion that the mother's "glamorous love lasts"—she continues to "sparkle and waltz and laugh," perhaps through her love for her daughter. The alliteration in this stanza through "stamping stars," "somewhere [...] Scotland," "before [...] born,"and "love lasts [...] laugh" adds a sense of vibrancy and energy to the poem's final image.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 2: “Maggie McGeeney”
- Line 6: “The thought”
- Line 7: “the thousand”
- Line 9: “mine,” “Ma”
- Line 12: “hands,” “high-heeled,” “red,” “relics”
- Line 14: “see,” “scent”
- Lines 17-17: “stamping star / s”
- Line 18: “somewhere”
- Line 19: “Scotland,” “before,” “born,” “love lasts”
- Line 20: “laugh”
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Allusion
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Apostrophe
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Onomatopoeia
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Rhetorical Question
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Simile
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Synecdoche
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"Before You Were Mine" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Shriek
- Polka-dot
- Marilyn
- Close
- Hiding
- Clatters
- George Square
- Cha cha cha!
- Mass
- Portobello
- Waltz
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(Location in poem: Line 4: “shriek at the pavement”)
To scream—in this case, with uncontrolled laughter.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Before You Were Mine”
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Form
"Before You Were Mine" has a regular stanza form, but aside from that doesn't use a particular poetic structure. The poem consists of four quintains (five-line stanzas), written in free verse with no rhyme scheme.
The poem is framed as a direct address from the speaker to her mother's younger self. The poem is thus an apostrophe, addressing someone "off-stage" who isn't able to answer back. The speaker grants herself a kind of magical imaginative power, traveling through time and space to visit her mother pre-motherhood—to show her mother as more than a mother. Each stanza focuses on one particular scene, like a series of photographs or little home movies.
The poem can also be read as a kind of eulogy, a song in praise of the dead. The poem seeks to celebrate the speaker's mother—to show that her "glamorous love lasts"—while also acknowledging that, on some level, the mother's glamourous younger self is gone forever.
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Meter
"Before You Were Mine" is written in free verse, without a regular meter. This gives the poem a conversational, intimate tone. Remember, this poem is addressed from the speaker to her mother, as if they were just two friends reminiscing. The lack of meter keeps the poem from sounding too overwrought; rigid meter wouldn't have that freedom of expression that arises between two people who know each other well.
Though the poem doesn't use a regular meter, there are a couple of points where it uses stresses for emphasis. Line 11, for example, uses regular stresses to evoke the speaker's cries as a baby:
The dec- | ade ahead | of my loud, | posses- | sive yell | was the best | one, eh?
The meter of this line is rising—meaning it goes from unstressed to stressed beats, here in a specific pattern of mostly iambs (da-DUM) and anapests (da-da-DUM). This creates a sense of predictability and monotony—one that perhaps reflects the seemingly endless work that comes with caring for a baby. The dense pattern of stresses at the end of the line also mirrors the "loud, possessive yell" of the speaker's baby self. Here, the poem turns up its own volume to match with its description.
The poem does something similar with the two heavy stresses at the start of line 17, in which the speaker describes coming home from "Mass, stamping stars from the wrong pavement." Here, as the speaker remembers how her mother would teach her the cha-cha on their way home from church, her stresses at the start of the line mimic the enthusiastic stamping of mother and daughter as they dance—rather than walk—home.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem doesn't use rhyme, instead opting for free verse throughout. This grants the poem a sense of intimacy. The speaker and her mother were clearly close, and with this comes the ability to speak openly and casually; rhyme would probably make the poem feel too ordered and structured. The lack of rhyme scheme means that the poem unfolds freely and unpredictably, which reflects the mother's fun-loving sense of freedom as a young woman.
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“Before You Were Mine” Speaker
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The overlap between Carol Ann Duffy's biography and the time and place described in the poem suggest that the speaker in "Before You Were Mine" is a version of the poet herself. (But one doesn't need to know this to appreciate the poem!)
The speaker, implied to be an adult at the time of the poem, is addressing her mother's younger self. The speaker is on a mission to remember and celebrate her mother as the whole and lively person she was before her daughter's birth, and in the poem she travels through space and time to get a glimpse of her mother's youth. The speaker delights in her young mother's vivacity, imagining her with the sparkle of a starlet, drawing all the eyes in a dancehall. There's a hint here of a childish worship for a mother's beauty (as when the speaker remembers playing with her mother's fancy high-heeled shoes), as well as an adult woman's understanding of her mother as a separate person with her own past life.
This speaker's admiration for her mother goes hand in hand with her gratitude. She understands that her mother gave up a significant part of herself so that her daughter could grow and flourish. Nevertheless, the speaker feels that—in some ghostly way—something of the mother's youthful "glamorous love" lives on.
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“Before You Were Mine” Setting
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"Before You Were Mine" plays with space and time, jumping freely between different moments in the speaker's mother's life. The poem thus seems to take place in two settings: the world of the past, and the world of the present.
The speaker's references to "George Square" and to holidays in "Portobello"—and her mother's friends' vividly Scottish names—set the scene in Scotland, and even more specifically, in Glasgow. This is Glasgow in the mid-20th-century, and it seems both mundane and glamorous: the speaker's mother can imagine "movie tomorrows" for herself, even as her own mother waits on the street corner to punish her from coming home late.
The speaker herself seems to have returned to Glasgow as she tells this poem, and can feel her mother's presence there: she sees her "ghost" crossing George Square in the present day. For the speaker, the Glasgow of the present is still interwoven with the Glasgow of the past, just as her mother's youth "lasts" even after it's long gone.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Before You Were Mine”
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Literary Context
Carol Ann Duffy's "Before You Were Mine" was published in Mean Time, her prize-winning 1993 collection that touches on themes of childhood, memory, love, and the passage of time. Readers may wish to check out "Nostalgia," "First Love," and "Stafford Afternoons"—among many others—from the book for comparison with "Before You Were Mine."
Readers often interpret this poem as being autobiographical, as its references to the speaker's mother's life in Glasgow match Duffy's own mother's history. And though this poem doesn't explicitly address feminist issues, it implicitly questions the sacrifices women have so often been expected to make in the name of motherhood. In this sense, the poem is in keeping with Duffy's work more broadly; her collections like The World's Wife and Standing Female Nude also speak to Duffy's poetic exploration of women's roles in society.
There is also, of course, a rich world of poetry that explores the relationships between parents and children, and more specifically the bonds between mothers and daughters. Part of this poem's aim seems to be to acknowledge the speaker's debt to her mother for all that she gave up upon motherhood. The poem "Mother Any Distance" by Duffy's contemporary and fellow Brit Simon Armitage touches on similar themes.
Duffy herself cites Sylvia Plath as a major influence on her work, and readers might also want to check out The Republic of Motherhood, a contemporary collection by Liz Berry—a poet who in turn references Duffy as an inspiration.
Historical Context
"Before You Were Mine" is a contemporary poem, but it makes little reference to the time-period around its own composition. Instead, it focuses mostly on the mid-20th century, when the speaker's mother was a young woman. The poem's references to "polka-dot dress[es]," ballroom dance halls, and Marilyn Monroe all place it squarely within the mid-1940s to 1950s. Duffy herself was born in 1955, meaning that if the poem is taken autobiographically, it begins in 1945—"ten years away" from Duffy's entrance into the world.
This period, coming on the heels of World War II, was a time of relative optimism. The nature of youth itself was changing, with the notion of adolescence as a distinct period between childhood and adulthood becoming more widely accepted. Being a teenager was generally considered an exciting, vibrant, and rebellious period in an individual's life.
Like other teenagers of the time, the speaker's mother dressed up, went out late, and flirted. Still, women's roles remained relatively constrained in a society that expected them to be mothers and wives above all else. In showing how the speaker's mother was essentially forced to give up her own passions and ambitions upon having a child, the poem implicitly critiques, or at least laments, the pressures placed on women to sacrifice their own identities in the service of raising kids and taking care of the home. In this sense, Duffy is applying a more contemporary feminist lens to treatment of women in the past.
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More “Before You Were Mine” Resources
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External Resources
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Motherhood in Poetry — Read a range of poems about mothers and motherhood. How do these compare with Duffy's version?
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The Poem Out Loud — Hear "Before You Were Mine" read aloud by the poet herself—accompanied by photos of her real-life family.
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A Short Biography of Duffy — Read some background on Duffy's life and work from the Scottish Poetry Library, and find links to more of her poems.
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Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch — Watch the iconic Marilyn Monroe scene the poem alludes to in line 5—the very picture of 1950s glamor!
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Carol Ann Duffy in Conversation — Watch an interview with the poet from the Lincoln Review.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Carol Ann Duffy
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