The Full Text of “Originally”
The Full Text of “Originally”
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“Originally” Introduction
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Carol Ann Duffy's "Originally" reflects on both the specific sadness of emigration and the universal sadness of growing up. In this poem, a small Scottish child, confused and frightened by her family's move to England, slowly loses her sense of cultural identity. Her journey from Scottishness to an undefined Britishness mirrors the broader human journey from the security of childhood to the self-conscious alienation of adulthood. Every adult, the poem suggests, is an exile from the "first space / and the right place" of their childhood self. "Originally" was first published in 1990 in Duffy's collection The Other Country.
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“Originally” Summary
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The speaker describes her family leaving their home country in a red car that sped through the fields, her mother saying her father's name over the music of the car's wheels as they spun. Her brothers were crying, one of them repeatedly shouting out for home as they drove farther away from their former city, street, house, and all the empty rooms in which they no longer lived. The speaker looked into the unseeing eyes of her stuffed animal and held its paw.
The speaker says that childhood itself is like leaving one's home country behind. Sometimes this process is slow, and leaves you on your feet, grimly accepting things, on a road where nobody you know lives. Other times this emigration seems to happen all of a sudden. Your accent is out of place, and familiar-looking corners actually lead to bewildering suburban developments, where older boys eat worms and yell out words you don't know. The speaker felt her parents' nervousness like a loose tooth rattling around in her own head. She wanted to go home, back to her own country.
But in time, the speaker says, you start to forget things, or you change, and when you see your brother swallowing a slug, you only feel a splinter of shame. She remembers leaving her former accent behind like a snake sheds its skin, until she spoke just like everyone else in her class. Does she really believe that she lost the landscape and culture of her country, her voice, and a sense of her first and rightful home? Now, when people she doesn't know ask her where she's from originally, she's not sure what to say.
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“Originally” Themes
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The Pain of Growing Up
Through a melancholy look back at the identity she lost when her family emigrated from Scotland to England, the speaker of “Originally” touches on a broader human feeling of displacement—that is, the sense of being always a bit out of place. The very act of growing up is a loss of “our own country,” the poem argues, of a feeling of being at home in both the world and in oneself.
As her family drives away from Scotland, the speaker feels that she is making a miserable journey away not just from her home, but also from her childhood itself. In the backseat of her family’s car, she's frightened and bewildered as she's taken away from the places she grew up. And when the speaker turns to her stuffed animal for comfort, she finds it has become an unresponsive object, a “blind toy.” This loss of the power to imagine a toy as a friend suggests she’s been abruptly forced out of her childhood innocence as well as her country.
Emigrating, here, means not just the loss of a homeland, but of everything that home represents: safety, comfort, and connection. The speaker's literal homesickness for Scotland is thus also a metaphorical homesickness for the security and happiness of childhood.
As her family begins its new life, the speaker more explicitly links emigration to growing up: “All childhood,” she says, “is an emigration.” Both relocating and getting older, she argues, entail painful, disorienting losses of self. “Corners" that "seem familiar" lead to strange and dreary places, but the issue isn't just that the speaker doesn't know her way around. It's that, turning these misleading corners, the speaker encounters “big boys”—menacing creatures who swear and eat worms. These “big boys” again link the strangeness of a new country to the fear of getting “big” yourself—that is, of growing up.
Emigration also makes the speaker feel ashamed of herself in a way that evokes the end of childhood: her Scottish accent becomes suddenly “wrong.” Even this awareness that one’s voice can be wrong marks a loss of childhood innocence and lack of self-consciousness. Building on this mood of sudden shame, the speaker describes her “tongue / shedding its skin like a snake” as her accent changes, evoking the treacherous serpent of the Garden of Eden. Her loss of Scottish identity is thus also presented as a kind of fall from grace: she loses the security of childhood and falls into the compromise, conformity, and alienation of adulthood.
It’s not just children who emigrate who feel displaced and homesick, this poem suggests. Everyone who grows up feels in some way severed from their sense of “first space / and the right place.” Everyone is homesick, the poem implies, for their childhood selves.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-24
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Emigration and Identity
Though the poem primarily uses emigration as an extended metaphor to describe the painful process of growing up, it also speaks to the confusing, isolating experience of literal emigration itself. The poem illustrates how leaving one’s home country results not simply in homesickness, but also in painful isolation and a confusing loss of identity.
The speaker presents driving away from Scotland as driving away from familiar touchstones—from markers of her former self. As she imagines the road “rush[ing]” back behind the car, she zooms in on the places that her family doesn’t “live any more”: “the city, / the street, the house, the vacant rooms” that they’ve left behind.
Her new land is filled with things that at first seem to resemble her home, but prove decidedly different. The “Corners” in England, for example, are deceptive in their familiarity; they may look like the corners back home, yet they lead to “unimagined” places. And whereas in the speaker can easily envision "the vacant rooms" of Scotland that she's left behind, in England she feels dislocated and unmoored, suddenly unsure of what she’ll stumble upon next. She's alone, "up an avenue / where no one [she] know[s] stays"—a description that reflect the initial loneliness and disorientation of moving to a new country.
Adding to her sense of isolation and confusion is the fact that she also can’t “understand” what older kids shout. Her accent feels “wrong,” implying that her voice itself—how she communicates who she is with the world—no longer fits in with her surroundings. And while the speaker eventually transforms herself into something resembling an English kid, she can never fully integrate. Even as she describes losing her accent and assimilating into English culture, her Scottish origins poke out: her use of the dialect word “skelf,” meaning “splinter,” suggests that her birthplace is still very much with her, separating her from "the rest."
And yet, this Scottishness is buried and fragmented, itself a “skelf,” and so her identity feels fragmentary to her, too. Asked where she comes from “originally,” she can only “hesitate.” The poem thus implies that she has lost more than “a river, culture, [and] speech”; without a clear sense of her origins, she’s lost a clear sense of who she is.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-24
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Originally”
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Lines 1-3
We came from ...
... of the wheels.The speaker of "Originally" sets the scene: she's one of a "we," a family, traveling together "in a red room / which fell through the fields," and listening to "our mother singing / our father's name" as they go.
These images immediately immerse the reader in a child's perspective. To a little kid, a car is as big as a room, and a mother's call to a father as they drive could indeed sound like music; imagine the way people draw out someone's name when they're trying to tell them how to drive without offending them.
The strangeness of these images reminds the reader of what it feels like to experience the world as a child, and the poem's sounds follow suit. The alliteration here, matching up pairs of sounds, is as singsong as the mother speaking to the father, almost like a nursery rhyme:
We came from our own country in a red room
which fell through the fields [...]But this childhood world doesn't seem to be perfectly peaceful. The "red room" is not driving, but falling through the fields, out of control. That red room itself is potentially a little ominous—and perhaps a subtle allusion. Anyone who's read Jane Eyre, in which a cruel aunt locks the terrified young Jane away overnight in the "red-room" as a punishment, will have a sense that a red room might be a place of danger. This echo of a famous story of childhood alienation underlines the speaker's misery.
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Lines 4-8
My brothers cried, ...
... holding its paw. -
Lines 9-11
All childhood is ...
... you know stays. -
Lines 11-14
Others are sudden. ...
... you don’t understand. -
Lines 15-16
My parents’ anxiety ...
... , I said. -
Lines 17-19
But then you ...
... skelf of shame. -
Lines 19-21
I remember my ...
... like the rest. -
Lines 21-24
Do I only ...
... And I hesitate.
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“Originally” Symbols
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Snakes
When the speaker imagines her "tongue / shedding its skin like a snake" as she gets used to life in her new country, she touches on a very classic bit of symbolism. The snake, with its venomous bite and its changeable skin, has long served as a symbol of treachery and deception. This tradition might be most familiar from the story of the Garden of Eden, in which the deceptive snake causes Adam and Eve's downfall.
In the biblical story, the serpent persuades Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which causes them, for the first time, to feel shame—to know they're naked. This story is, among other things, the story of the loss of childhood innocence that comes with adult self-awareness. (Just think about how happy kids are running around naked when they're little!)
In connecting her changing accent to snakes, the speaker evokes a story that is itself symbolically connected to the pains of growing up. Losing the "sense of first space / and the right place," in this poem as in Eden, is a matter of adopting the tricky, shape-shifting qualities of a snake.
Here, the speaker's snaky tongue thus speaks to her feeling that she has both lost something and betrayed something. As she mimics the kids around her and loses her Scottish accent, she does a quiet injury to her inner self. Through this image, she relates herself both to the fallen Eve and the traitorous snake.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 19-21: “I remember my tongue / shedding its skin like a snake, my voice / in the classroom sounding just like the rest.”
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Rivers
The river of the poem's final stanza can be taken as symbolic of the spirit of the place the speaker left behind in childhood—and also as the life she left behind. Rivers often serve as symbols for the souls of cities; think of the importance of the Thames to London, or the Tiber to Rome. But they also represent the onward rush of life and the movement of time. In losing a river, the speaker is not just losing a connection to her home city, but to the whole course of the life she would have had if her family had stayed in Scotland.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 21-23: “Do I only think / I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space / and the right place?”
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The Blind Toy
As the speaker's family drives away from Scotland in the poem's first stanza, the speaker turns to her stuffed animal for comfort, "holding its paw." But it has become "a blind toy," a sightless object that can't offer any real comfort. This toy is a poignant symbol of lost childhood innocence.
Readers themselves may remember a moment from childhood when a beloved toy turned from a friend to a mere object—a painful but inevitable loss. This transition mirrors the movement of the speaker's own life: from Scottishness to Englishness, and from childhood innocence to uncomfortable adult self-awareness. The toy's now-lifeless eyes represent how suddenly the speaker's life changes, and how impossible it is for her to return to the "first space / and the right place" of her early years.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 7-8: “I stared / at the eyes of a blind toy, holding its paw.”
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“Originally” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
The alliteration in "Originally" fits in with the poem's interest in feeling at home—or feeling homesick.
The poem's alliteration is strongest in the first stanza, which is told from a child's-eye perspective. Take a look at all the matching initial sounds in the poem's first two lines:
We came from our own country in a red room
which fell through the fields [...]These pairs of /c/, /r/, and /f/ sounds make the poem's first lines feel almost like a nursery rhyme. Simple, matching sounds suggest the speaker's poignant youth. Perhaps there's also something a little sad in all those matched sounds as well: the speaker is about to move into a part of her life when she won't feel matched with anything around her.
The poem's alliteration drops off sharply after the first stanza (though there's plenty of sibilance—see the separate Poetic Devices entry for more on that). But it comes back again briefly when the speaker remembers "big boys / eating worms and shouting words you don't understand." Here, the blunt /b/ sounds of "big boys" makes those boys seem a little menacing, and the /w/ connection between the "words" they shout and the "worms" they eat suggest that there's something gross and wriggly about their speech to the speaker's Scottish ear.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 1: “came,” “country,” “red room”
- Line 2: “fell,” “fields”
- Line 3: “father’s,” “to,” “turn”
- Line 4: “brothers,” “bawling”
- Line 5: “city”
- Line 6: “street”
- Line 9: “Some,” “slow”
- Line 13: “big,” “boys”
- Line 14: “worms,” “words”
- Line 18: “seeing,” “swallow,” “slug”
- Line 19: “skelf”
- Line 20: “skin,” “snake”
- Line 22: “speech,” “sense”
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Assonance
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Asyndeton
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Colloquialism
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Enjambment
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Sibilance
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Metaphor
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Repetition
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Simile
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"Originally" 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.
- Bawling
- Vacant
- Emigration
- Resigned
- Estates
- Pebble-dashed
- Skelf
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(Location in poem: Lines 4-5: “My brothers cried, one of them / , / Home / , / Home / , ”; Line 4: “bawling”)
Shouting through tears.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Originally”
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Form
"Originally" uses free verse, with no consistent meter or rhyme scheme, but it does have a purposeful shape. The poem is broken into three stanzas of eight lines, and each of those stanzas marks a stage in the speaker's journey from her Scottish childhood to her displaced adulthood.
The first stanza is fully immersed in a child's perspective. The speaker imagines her family's car as "a red room" and remembers holding the paw of her stuffed animal. But the second stanza zooms right out, making a broad pronouncement on childhood from an adult perspective. While the first stanza focuses on a specific important incident in the speaker's life, the second presents the speaker's early experiences in England in more general, habitual terms: these are things that happened over and over.
By the third stanza, the speaker has transitioned fully into the "now" of her adulthood, and she presents her memories as memories. The shape of the poem reflects its themes, pulling her from the immediacy of childhood into a more general adult sadness.
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Meter
"Originally" uses free verse, without regular metrical feet or a consistent number of beats per line. The lines flow on here with a natural speaking rhythm, and their matter-of-factness underlines the fact that something like the speaker's experience happens to everyone as they grow up.
But there are still a few moments of metrical emphasis here. For example, take a look at how the stressed syllables fall at the beginning of the third stanza:
But then | you forget, | or don’t | recall, | or change,
and, see- | ing your bro- | ther swal- | low a slug, | feel only
a skelf | of shame. [...]Here, the beats are almost all iambs (da-DUM) or anapests (da-da-DUM), both rising meters (meaning they move from unstressed to stressed beats). While this isn't part of a consistent meter throughout the poem, the stresses hit pretty regularly and insistently, evoking the way that the daily grind of the speaker's new life erodes her sense of identity.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Originally" doesn't use rhyme—a choice that fits right in with the poem's mood and themes. This is a poem that's all about feeling lost and displaced, and the lack of rhyme scheme reflects that. There's no easy harmony or comforting pattern here.
However, there are a few little specks of meaningful internal rhyme here. Take a look at lines 15-16:
My parents’ anxiety stirred like a loose tooth
in my head. I want our own country, I said.Here, the speaker, feeling her parents' nervousness as her own, also matches what's in her "head" with what she "said." The rhyme adds urgency to her childish insistence. Another moment of internal rhyme, between "first space / and the right place" in lines 22-23, harmonizes with the feeling of rightness that the line describes.
But something subtler and sadder happens with internal rhyme in lines 6-8:
[...] the vacant rooms
where we didn’t live any more. I stared
at the eyes of a blind toy, holding its paw.The words "more" and "paw" can work as an internal rhyme—but only if they're read in an English accent. The speaker's cultural loss is baked right into the sounds of her changed speech.
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“Originally” Speaker
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Like this poem's speaker, Carol Ann Duffy moved from Scotland to England as a small child. Both the poem's narrative and its details—the use of the Scottish dialect word "skelf," the "pebble-dashed estates" of the speaker's new home—suggest that "Originally" is autobiographical. We're calling the speaker "her" throughout this guide for that reason, though the speaker's gender is never explicitly stated in the poem itself and thus doesn't have to be interpreted this way.
Even as an adult, this speaker feels like an exile from a half-forgotten home. But her vivid memory of the sensations and emotions of childhood means that the first part of her life isn't all that far away. Her experience of displacement and nostalgia is colored by her oddly strong grip on all that she's lost.
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“Originally” Setting
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There are two settings here: the family car in which the speaker leaves Scotland, and a gray, run-down, slimy-bug-ridden England. In describing her sense of loss and displacement, the speaker makes Scotland more a blank than a place; she knows it's the home she longs for, but its details have gone missing.
What's left of Scotland is presented in broad strokes that often touch on the natural world, not just the speaker's town: the fields and the river stand alongside—and stand for—a whole culture. England, on the other hand, is evoked concretely through faceless architecture; those "pebble-dashed estates" suggest a very English kind of suburban dreariness.
The poem's Scottish setting therefore becomes almost mythical, while the English setting feels oppressively solid, featureless, and limiting.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Originally”
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Literary Context
"Originally" was first published in 1990 as part of Carol Ann Duffy's third poetry collection, The Other Country. The collection broadly focuses on journeys (literal and otherwise), emigration, language, and growing up (for another poem from this collection that touches on adolescent angst, check out "In Mrs Tilscher's Class").
Like the speaker of "Originally," Duffy (born in 1955) is a Scottish-born poet who emigrated to England as a small child. She became the first (and so far, the only) female Poet Laureate of the UK. A lesbian and a child of working-class Glaswegian immigrants, Duffy was seen as a potentially controversial choice—but regardless of politicians' squeamishness, she has become one of the best-known and best-beloved of contemporary poets.
Duffy grew up in the thick of the women's movement, and her feminism often appears in her poetry. One of her most famous collections, The World's Wife, draws on everything from Aesop's fables to Greek mythology to King Kong to tell the unheard stories of female characters in history and literature. She's deeply interested in folklore and fairy tales, but also in day-to-day life, and her poems speak through the voices of a wide cast of characters.
While her poetry is sometimes critical of institutions, Duffy considers herself part of an old literary tradition, and lists both Keats and Plath among her influences. She has in turn supported the poetic careers of writers like Alice Oswald and Kate Clanchy.
Historical Context
Carol Ann Duffy's poetic career took off during the age of Margaret Thatcher, whose long tenure as Prime Minister of the UK was marked by class struggle, poverty, and the dismantling of post-war welfare institutions. Thatcher rose to power in the aftermath of the turbulent 1970s, and her libertarian economics and conservative social policies (as well as her prominent role as the first woman Prime Minister of the UK) made her a divisive and much-reviled figure. Many working-class people took a particular dislike to Thatcher for her union-busting and her failure to support impoverished families in industrial fields like coal-mining.
Perhaps in response to a growing social conservatism, the '70s and '80s in England were also marked by a rise in feminist consciousness. Books like Susan Faludi's Backlash examined the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways in which society was reacting against the women's movement, and third-wave feminism, focused on identity and political power, began to emerge out of the second-wave feminism of the '60s. Duffy's work, with its interest in women's inner lives and in corners of working-class life often neglected by the literary world, reflects the tumultuous political world in which she came of age.
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More “Originally” Resources
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External Resources
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A Short Biography — Read about Carol Ann Duffy's life and work, and find links to more of her poems.
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Duffy's Coronavirus Poetry Project — Learn about Duffy's initiative to collect poetry about the pandemic.
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A Reading of Another of Duffy's Poems — Read an analysis of another of Duffy's poems, "Vocation," which asks questions about autobiographical poetry—some of which might be relevant to "Originally," too!
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An Interview with Duffy — Listen to Duffy give an interview about her position as British Poet Laureate. She was the first (and so far, the only) woman elected to the role.
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In the Poet's Voice — Watch Duffy perform her own poetry.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Carol Ann Duffy
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