The Full Text of “The Emigrée”
The Full Text of “The Emigrée”
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“The Emigrée” Introduction
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"The Emigrée" was written by the British poet Carol Rumens. A first-person speaker describes how as a child she was forced to flee her homeland and emigrate to another country because of war and tyranny. Though the speaker can never return to her home, it still occupies an important place in her heart. She keeps it alive through memory, which is compared to sunlight throughout the poem—suggesting warmth and vitality. The poem deliberately avoids tying itself to a particular context, instead looking more generally at the emigrant experience—with all its trauma and nostalgic longing for home.
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“The Emigrée” Summary
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Once upon a time there was a country... I left that country when I was still just a kid. My memory of it, however, remains strong and clear as sunlight. That's because apparently I never saw the city in the late fall, a time of year that people tell me comes even to the calmest, warmest of places. So even when I hear really bad news about that country, it can't destroy my happy vision of my old home, which remains strong and clear in my mind, like a heavy paperweight resting on my thoughts. My home country might be filled with violence and dictators now, but I will forever associate it with a feeling of comfort and warmth, with sunlight.
The city's white streets and beautiful hills become even clearer in my mind as time marches on, like an army tank rolling over the past, and as the vast distance between myself my city grows. When I left I took the few words from my native language that I knew as a child, carrying that vocabulary with me like a toy with nothing inside of it. Now, as I learn more words and grammar, my knowledge of that language expands. Soon I'll be totally fluent in it. Though the oppressive regime in my home country tries to ban that language, I can't stop speaking it. Those words are always on my tongue, tasting of the warmth and comfort that I associate with my home.
I don't have a passport and can never go back to my home. My old city visits me, though, flying to me on a white plane. My city lies in front of me as calmly as a piece of paper. I gently brush its hair and look lovingly into its bright eyes. My old city and I go dancing through the night in my new city, which is filled with walls. People gather around and accuse me of being a traitor. They tell me I'm a dark presence in their supposedly free city. Meanwhile, my home city takes cover behind me, afraid of them. They talk about death, but my shadow proves that the sun still shines.
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“The Emigrée” Themes
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The Nature of Memory
“The Emigrée” is, in large part, about the nature of memories—particularly childhood memories. While also exploring some of the traumatic effects of exile, the poem shows how memory can give people strength—something to hold onto even when everything else around them has changed. Even though the speaker's (unspecified) home country is now ravaged by war and tyranny, the speaker’s memory of that place remains an indestructible source of comfort. By the same token, however, the poem also explores the unreliability of memory—the way in which it may lack specifics and seem overly idealized.
Though the speaker left her home country as a child, it continues to exert a strong hold on her. She describes her memory as “sunlight-clear” (suggesting warmth and nourishment in addition to clarity). Indeed, the poem continuously describes memory as a source of light throughout. No matter what dark “news” the speaker hears about where she came from, it “cannot break” her “original view” of her home as a place filled with “white streets” and “graceful slopes.” She is “branded by an impression of sunlight,” meaning she has been forever marked by the memory of the city she has left behind. Her home country is implied to be war-torn and ruled by tyranny, but her memories are presented as something that none of this violence can override.
In fact, her memories only grow stronger as time passes and the distance between the speaker’s present and past grows larger. Though “time rolls its tanks,” threatening to erode the speaker’s memories as the years go by, the speaker holds tightly to what little she has of her home, describing how her memory “tastes of sunlight.”
Ultimately, it’s easy to see why memory is so important to the speaker—she has very little else. With not even a passport to call her own, the speaker gives the reader the impression that—in the rush to leave her war-torn home—she was left with little of her possessions. Memory, then, is something she holds onto dearly. That’s why she presents herself as a kind of protector of her home city, which “hides behind” her when a shady “they” tries to attack. (This is probably the same “they” that ravaged the city with war in the first place.) Her memory, then, is like a bomb shelter in which some semblance of the city as it once was can survive. She tends to it like a pet or a lover, combing “its hair” and staring at “its shining eyes.”
With this in mind, though, there’s also something unsettling about the role of memory in this poem. The “sunlight” that it gives is warm and comforting, but it also comes across as blinding. The memory is an “impression,” based on experiences from so long ago that it’s hard to say how real or reliable it actually is. The speaker makes clear that this city is not the same as it was when she left it, and that she might not be remembering it accurately in the first place.
Indeed, the speaker left her country with only a “child’s vocabulary” and “never saw it in that November / which, I am told, comes to the mildest city.” In other words, she may never have seen the city as it really was, because she was too young to understand, or left before the real horrors began. Her memories of childhood are thus akin to “a hollow”—or empty—“doll.” Even as the poem asserts the lasting power of memory, then, it implies that it is also limited and fallible—that it is a soft “impression” of a place, rather than a sharp, accurate photograph.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-16
- Lines 17-25
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Exile and Home
“The Emigrée,” as the title suggests, is a poem that tries to convey the pain and confusion of the emigrant experience—to get across an impression of what it is like to have to leave your home (and possibly family) behind. Implicitly, the poem implores its readers not to take their own comforts for granted, and explores the way that corrupted “state” power can undo everything that a person holds dear.
The poem offers no clue as to the speaker’s current living situation. All the reader knows is that this person no longer lives in the city she originally called home—and that there’s no chance of going back. The poem demonstrates the trauma of this experience and, in doing so, shows the way that political turmoil affects individual lives. Indeed, the lack of specifics about the speaker’s situation attests to the way that this is a universal and all-too-common experience.
Exile has ruptured the speaker’s connection with her home. The speaker was a child at the time of the conflict—and perhaps that’s why the poem opens almost like a fairytale, with the phrase, “There once was a country." This opening also suggests the way that this country no longer exists, at least not in the same form. The speaker’s home, too, no longer exists like it once did (except in her memory).
The speaker’s new relationship with her old home is characterized by distance. The physical distance she has had to travel becomes a metaphorical distance too, with “news” (media) being the main way that she learns about her country's current situation. Indeed, the playful descriptions in the third stanza—in which the speaker combs the hair of her city and “love[s] its shining eyes”—is a way of restoring intimacy to her relationship with her home. That is, home is a place people feel deeply connected to. Living in another country, the speaker can only find this connection in her imagination.
Furthermore, her physical displacement becomes a cultural one too. In order to fit in with her new home, the speaker needs to take on new language and customs. But doing so too much would risk erasing her relationship with original home, which is why she holds onto her first language and childhood memories so dearly. This speaks to the sheer psychological complexity of the emigrant experience.
The speaker’s traumatic disconnection from her home land is so severe that there is “no way back at all.” This captures how emigration can be a fundamental change of circumstances—for some, it is irreversible. The past can't be retrieved, and the emigrée can't return to her homeland. Emigration closes off an entire chapter of the speaker’s existence.
The mention of the speaker’s “passport” (or, more accurately, lack thereof) in line 17 is important too. Passports are the official documents of identity, granting access into and out of nations. Weighed against the brilliance of the speaker’s memories and the intense descriptions of childhood, the passport seems like an absurd object in this poem—an arbitrary part of the speaker’s identity. That is, not having a passport doesn’t make the speaker any less able to identify with the home of her youth—it just means she can’t go back. This builds an unsettling sense of an imbalance of power in the poem, the “state” taking charge of who can and can’t call a place home—and “mutter[ing] death” at anyone who might dare to challenge this system.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-6
- Lines 7-8
- Lines 9-16
- Lines 17-25
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Emigrée”
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Lines 1-4
There once was ...
... the mildest city."The Emigrée" opens with a mysterious first sentence: "There once was a country..." Immediately, this tells the reader a lot about the rest of the poem. First of all, this phrase alludes to the typical opening of a fairy tale ("once upon a time"). The poem has a fantastical, dream-like quality running all the way through—and this line helps set that up.
Pushing this idea further, this also means that the reliability of what follows is under question from the beginning. That is, when the speaker presents the deep love that she holds in her memory for her home country, the poem subtly questions how much of this memory is real and how much imagined.
This opening phrase also gently subverts the typical fairy-tale opening by focusing on a place (rather than a time), demonstrating that the speaker's identity—as an emigrant from one country to another—is largely defined by where she lived as a child and where she lives now. Finally, the ellipsis caesura that follows this opening remark makes the fairy-tale statement trail off, indicating it is somehow interrupted or incomplete. Subtly, this hints at the way that the speaker's life itself suffered a kind of rupture when she had to leave her home.
After this caesura, the speaker clarifies which country she is talking about—the one in which she was born and, for a time, raised. She tells the reader how she was forced to leave when she was a child but that her memory of her home city remains strong and clear. The discussion of the memory thus begins an important relationship between memory and light that runs throughout the poem, with light representing warmth, knowledge, and moral goodness.
Lines 2-4 ("but my memory ... the mildest city") are also deliberately vague, the speaker explaining how it "seems" she never saw her city in "that November" which she is "told" visits itself upon "the mildest city." There's a lot of second-hand information here ("seems" and "I am told"), and it's not quite clear what is being discussed. Perhaps the speaker is referencing a particular November—maybe the one in which war took hold of her city—or maybe she is talking about Novembers more generally. Is November meant to represent the coming winter, and, metaphorically, times of death and hardship? Is "the mildest city" her home city, or just a turn of phrase?
It's hard to say, but this is in keeping with the way the poem never offers much in terms of specifics about the speaker's situation. Most likely, this is intended to make the poem more universal, looking for common ground in the emigrant experience.
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Lines 5-8
The worst news ...
... impression of sunlight. -
Lines 9-11
The white streets ...
... close like waves. -
Lines 12-16
That child’s vocabulary ...
... tastes of sunlight. -
Lines 17-20
I have no ...
... its shining eyes. -
Lines 21-25
My city takes ...
... evidence of sunlight.
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“The Emigrée” Symbols
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Light
Throughout the poem, the speaker's memory is consistently linked with light. In the first stanza, the speaker describes her recollections as "sunlight-clear;" later in the same stanza, it is a "bright, filled paperweight" and "an impression of sunlight." Contrasted with the mention of war and the bleak weather of November, light starts to represent warmth, knowledge, and moral virtue.
That's why the streets—in the speaker's memory—are "white" with light, "glow[ing]" ever "clearer" even as time passes by. It seems the more negative news the speaker hears about her home city as it is now, the more loving, affectionate, and compassionate the city becomes in her memory. And in the poem's final image, the speaker sees her own existence as "evidence of sunlight"—that is, the fact that she is still alive, still casting a "shadow," proves that there is moral good in the world beyond the darkness of the city under the rule of tyrants.
At the same time, this reliance on light also introduces a note of doubt into the poem. The memory is so bright and "white" that there is a sense in which it starts to become bleached and undefined, suggesting that it might also be overly idealized in the speaker's mind.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 2: “sunlight-clear”
- Line 6: “bright, filled paperweight”
- Line 8: “an impression of sunlight”
- Line 9: “white streets”
- Line 10: “glow even clearer”
- Line 16: “tastes of sunlight”
- Line 18: “white plane”
- Line 20: “shining eyes”
- Line 23: “dark in their free city”
- Line 25: “my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight”
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“The Emigrée” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration is used sporadically throughout "The Emigrée." It is first used in line 1:
There once was a country… I left it as a child
The /w/ sound adds to the sing-song, fairy-tale like opening statement of the poem. Lines 2 and 3 then alliterate on the /m/, /n/, and /s/ sounds:
but my memory of it is sunlight-clear
for it seems I never saw it in that NovemberThis cluster of alliteration continues the poem's lyrical tone. The opening lines sound pretty and poetic—which makes sense, given that the speaker is describing her beloved home.
The next significant alliteration is in line 8, with: "but I am branded by an impression of sunlight." This relates to the way that the speaker experiences her memory: it is something permanent and unshakeable, a source of strength. For this reason, it is "branded" on her life. To match, the line is itself branded by plosive /b/ sounds. These sounds, however, in their connection to the word "branded," also hint at torture and violence (which is one of the most common reasons why people have to emigrate in the first place).
As if in reference to line 8's alliteration, lines 15 and 16 return to this /b/ sound. Here, the speaker is describing forms of oppression used by the state to exert its power. The /b/ sounds dominate the line, barely allowing other sounds to exist:
It may by now be a lie, banned by the state
but I can’t ...The alliterating /t/ sounds in "tongue" and "tastes" come along like a kind of relief from this /b/ sound, and emphasize the intensity of the speaker's memories.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 1: “o,” “w”
- Line 2: “m,” “m,” “s”
- Line 3: “s,” “n,” “s,” “N”
- Line 7: “m,” “b,” “m,” “b”
- Line 8: “b,” “b,” “b”
- Line 9: “s,” “c,” “g,” “s,” “l”
- Line 10: “g,” “l,” “cl,” “t,” “t”
- Line 11: “cl”
- Line 15: “b,” “b,” “b,” “b”
- Line 16: “b,” “t,” “t”
- Line 17: “n,” “n”
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Allusion
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Diacope
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Metaphor
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Personification
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Simile
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"The Emigrée" 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.
- Sunlight-clear
- Tyrants
- Frontiers
- The state
- Docile
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(Location in poem: Line 2: “sunlight-clear”)
Easily seen; the speaker is saying that her memories appear as brightly and clearly as if illuminated by sunlight.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Emigrée”
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Form
"The Emigrée" consists of three stanzas. On first glance they might appear to be of equal length, but they aren't. The first two stanzas are octets—eight-line stanza—while the final stanza is actually nine lines in length. There isn't a strong reason as to why this is—rather, it seems to follow the intuition of the speaker. That said, because the stanzas are roughly the same size, they each carry equal weight, and each take a different approach to the speaker's subject.
The first stanza opens with a phrase that alludes to the clichéd opening line of a fairy tale: once upon a time. This sets up the rest of the speaker's discussion about the relationship between her old city and her childhood memory, but also indicates that what follows is also a kind of tussle between reality and imagination. That is, like a fairy-tale, the speaker's memory relies on a degree of fantasy.
The second stanza focuses on language. The speaker gives more details about her situation without ever making it specific in terms of time or place. Rather, she discusses how leaving her childhood home has affected her experience of her native language.
The third stanza concentrates on the way that keeping the city alive in the speaker's memory is in itself an act of rebellion. Like the other stanzas, it is very metaphorical. It compares the speaker's relationship with her native city to a kind of dance—a dance that is eventually persecuted by a malicious "they." The speaker tries to protect her positive memories of her city from this "they."
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Meter
"The Emigrée" does not have a strictly defined meter. The lines are approximately organized by having five stresses in each, but this is fairly irregular throughout. As such, the poem is best classified as free verse—its rhythms flow and change as it progresses, reflecting its thoughtful, almost stream-of-consciousness tone. Most of the poem's effects are achieved through its imagery and sound, rather than its establishment or disruption of rhythm. Overall, the poem is fairly conversational in tone (though the content is itself quite fantastical) and the lack of strict rhythm helps create this sound.
There are, however, a couple of notable moments relating to the placement of stresses. Here is line 13 (quoted with 12 for context):
That child’s vocabulary I carried here
like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar.The arrangement of stresses here emphasizes the line's two active verbs, "opens and spills," bringing them more to life. By disrupting any potential iambic (da DUM) pattern, this line acts like a "spill[age]" of stresses. (It doesn't make sense to break this line down to individual feet, however, since the whole point is that it's so irregular.)
Another beautiful moment occurs in line 21:
My cit- | y takes | me danc- | ing through | the city
Here the poem briefly establishes a regular iambic pentameter (five iambs in a row) with one extra unstressed syllable at the end (something called a feminine ending). This conveys the image of the dance, the speaker and the city moving together joyfully.
Taken together, these two examples illustrate the range of the poem's rhythms, which fluctuate between something like regular iambic pentameter and freer, more impressionistic lines.
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Rhyme Scheme
"The Emigrée" is an unrhymed poem. Having regular rhymes would probably feel too neat and tidy for a poem with such a conversational, introspective tone. Instead, the poem relies on devices like assonance and consonance to lend the poem a sense of musicality. Take the lilting /w/ sounds in "once was," which add to the sing-song, fairy-tale quality of the poem's opening line. The assonance towards the end of the stanza is again evocative, the many /ay/, long and short /i/ sounds making these lines feel melodious and lyrical:
... cannot break
my original view, the bright, filled paperweight.
It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants,
but I am branded by an impression of sunlight."Break" and "paperweight" could even be considered slant rhymes here, as could "tanks" and "waves" in the next stanza. But, again, there is no clear pattern to the poem's use of subtle rhyme. Instead, the subtler assonance and consonance reflect the strength and beauty of the speaker's memories.
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“The Emigrée” Speaker
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The speaker in "The Emigrée" is the emigrée herself. This identifies the speaker as a woman because of the female spelling of the title word (the extra "e" is a feminine ending). An emigrée is someone who has left her country—here, it's implied, for reasons of political unrest.
The poem is told in the first-person, with the speaker reflecting on her exile from her home country. She was a child when this happened, and holds on dearly to her childhood memory. This memory is so "bright" as to suggest that it may be unreliable, idealized to the point that it's hard to say whether it's real or not.
The speaker has by no means forgotten her home country. She still keeps up with "news" about what's happening there, and actively maintains her relationship with her original language. Indeed, she sees herself as the protector of the memory of what her home city was like before the onset of oppression.
That said, the speaker offers no specifics about her experience as an emigrant. The poem is heavily reliant on figurative language, and doesn't reveal anything about where the speaker emigrated from or immigrated to—nor does it offer any clue as to time or place. This makes the poem feel more universal, a look at the emigrant experience more widely. Indeed, emigration happens all over the world.
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“The Emigrée” Setting
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The poem is deliberately vague about its setting. It never lets on where the emigrée now lives, nor where she lived when she was a child. This makes the poem more general—it's about anyone who has had to flee their country. Indeed, people have had to emigrate for various reasons throughout human history, so it is a fairly universal experience.
Ultimately, the poem takes place in the speaker's memory. She conjures up a recollection of her childhood home, the memory bright and full of metaphorical "sunlight." This contrasts with what she hears about her home country as it is now—"at war" and "sick with tyrants."
As the poem progresses, the speaker reveals that "there's no way back at all" to her old country. Furthermore, things in her new country are not as she might hope: "They accuse me of being dark in their free city." Thus, even as the poem takes place in the speaker's memory, it uses the facts of the real world as a source of contrast. These facts highlight how the speaker clings to her memories as a source of inspiration.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Emigrée”
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Literary Context
Carol Rumens is a contemporary British poet born in 1944. She grew up in London before studying in Manchester. Since then, she has worked widely in Britain's universities, teaching creative writing. She published her first collection, A Strange Girl in Bright Colours, in 1973, and has published many others since.
Rumens counts the Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam among her influences. Indeed, she is quoted as saying that these two poets were a particular influence on "The Emigrée": "The poem is about conflict between imagination and convention. The speaker is an inner emigré—not politically but emotionally. I think it relates to my interest in Russian writers such as Akhmatova and Mandelstam." That isn't to say that the poem isn't in part about politics and nationhood too—after all, it's because of the situation in her home country that the speaker has to leave. Rumens is also influenced by Irish poets such as Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, and Michael Longley.
There are a number of poems on a similar subject. Good poems for comparison include W.H. Auden's "Refugee Blues," "Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds" by Ocean Vuong, and "Instead of Losing" by John Ashbery.
Historical Context
One of the most noticeable aspects of "The Emigrée" is that it intentionally lacks a specific historical context. Arguably, this makes the poem read like the chronicle of a universal experience. It explores the difficult trauma of being forced to leave your home for good, and offers a depiction of how to keep the memory of that home alive.
Emigration forms a large part of the human story. The Bible, for example, is full of the mass migration of peoples from one part of the earth to another. Other famous mass movements include the settlement of America by pilgrims, and the Jewish diaspora.
Emigration happens for many reasons. As is stated in this poem, it often relates to war, conflict, and oppression. Sadly, this is hardly a thing of the past. Recent events in Syria, to name one example among many, have forced large numbers of people out of their homes and into a search for a new place to live. Though the poem avoids specific context details, the tank metaphor in line 10 dates it to the 20th century or later.
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More “The Emigrée” Resources
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External Resources
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Rumens In Her Own Words — An insightful interview with the poet.
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Rumens's Picks — Carol Rumens selects her favorite poetry of 2017.
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Poems about Emigration and Exile — A great selection of poems on similar subjects from the Poetry Foundation.
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Poems by Anna Akhmatova — Works by the Russian Poet Akhmatova, cited by Rumens as an influence on "The Emigrée."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Carol Rumens
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