-
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” Introduction
-
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” is a poem by the Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy, first published in her 1990 collection titled The Other Country. The poem describes the angst-filled transition between childhood and adolescence. Childhood is a safe and innocent place for the speaker until learning about sex and desire makes the world feel messy and confusing. The speaker longs nostalgically for the comfort and security of childhood, but also knows that change is irreversible; once you grow up, the poem implies, you can't go back.
-
-
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” Summary
-
You could take a trip up the Nile River, tracing its course on the map with your finger, while your teacher, Mrs. Tilscher, described the scenery along its banks, the countries and cities it runs through: places like Tana, Ethiopia, Khartoum, and Aswân. That might last an hour, and then you'd have milk from a bottle shaped like the bowling pins used in the game skittles. You’d forget all about the Pyramids in Egypt when they were erased from the chalkboard, as if they had crumbled out of existence. Someone would open the windows using a long pole. You'd hear the happy sound of the school bell as another student ran back and forth to ring it.
Being in school was better than being at home. At school there were books that sucked you in. The classroom was as bright as a candy shop. There was paper the color of sugar, and different-colored shapes. Brady and Hindley, a couple who murdered children in the 1960s, disappeared from your mind when you were at school: they were just a mistake, like the smudge of an eraser. Mrs. Tilscher loved you. Sometimes when you got to class, you’d find she’d put a gold star by your name. There was the smell of a pencil as you slowly sharpened it, and the confused sound of a xylophone echoing down the hall from another grade.
Over the Easter break, the black tadpoles grew from squiggly comma-shaped creatures to long, slinky things that looked exclamation points. A dumb kid let three frogs go and they jumped around the playground. A line of kids left the lunch line and followed them, hopping and making croaking noises like the frogs. A tough boy told you how sex works. You kicked him, but then when you got home you stared in horror at your parents.
In that agitated July the air tasted electric. A feeling of panic made you constantly feel messy, overheated, and full of conflict, while sultry sky weighed on you. You asked Mrs. Tilscher how sex worked and she just smiled and turned away. Final grades were released. You ran out of the school, eager to be grown up, as a thunderstorm started.
-
-
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” Themes
-
Growing Up
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” captures the jarring transition from childhood to adolescence, prompted in the poem by the speaker's growing knowledge of sexuality and desire. Childhood in the poem is a sweet and innocent time filled with simple pleasures; the poem’s speaker thus looks back on childhood with nostalgia—as a blissful period that can’t be recovered once it's been lost. The poem illustrates how adolescence, by contrast, is at once seductive and scary—full of tension, trouble, and excitement.
When the poem begins, Mrs. Tilcher's classroom—which represents the speaker's childhood innocence—is both welcoming and safe. The speaker describes the joys of being in class in vivid detail—listening to the teacher describe the “scenery” along the Nile River, having a “skittle of milk”—and in doing so emphasizes the wonder of being a kid. The classroom even “glow[s] like a sweet shop.” In other words, it looks like a candy store—a place of indulgence designed for children.
The speaker also feels protected from the dangers of the outside world in Mrs. Tilcher's classroom. For instance, the speaker notes that “Brady and Hindley”—an allusion to a real-world case of child murder in the 1960s—“faded like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake.” The classroom is a totally nonthreatening world, where violence itself is a “mistake” rather than something the students need to worry about.
All this changes once the speaker learns about sexual reproduction and, in doing so, gets a glimpse of the grown-up world that exists beyond the safety of the classroom. This shift happens quickly, alluded to by the speaker's reference to “inky tadpoles" suddenly transforming "from commas into exclamation marks" one spring. The physical changes that the tadpoles are undergoing mirror those of the students starting puberty and becoming aware of their sexuality. And when a "rough boy" on the playground tells the speaker about how babies are made, the spell of childhood is abruptly broken.
Shortly thereafter, the speaker develops sexual desires, viewing the “sky” as “heavy, sexy” and feeling “always untidy, hot.” None of this is particularly pleasant for the speaker, who understands that such newfound feelings and knowledge chip away at the pleasures of childhood innocence. Sexuality seems threatening and uncomfortable, and the speaker is "appalled" upon realizing this knowledge of how babies are made applies to the speaker's own parents as well.
The speaker, like Adam and Eve in the Bible, has been kicked out of the blissful paradise of childhood ignorance. There's no turning back, the poem implies, and as such the speaker is “impatient to be grown”—to get on with this chaotic, transitional period. The final image of a thunderstorm cracking open in the sky reflects the electric turmoil happening within the speaker, as well as all the emotions, sensations, and world-shaking learnings that are about to change everything.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-30
-
-
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “In Mrs Tilscher’s Class”
-
Lines 1-4
You could travel ...
... Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswân.The first four lines of “In Mrs. Tilscher’s Class” establish the poem’s theme and its form. The poem begins with the speaker describing the comfortable, pleasurable routines of life in Mrs. Tilscher’s classroom. In lines 1-4 ("You could travel [...] Khartoum. Aswân"), the speaker focuses on a geography lesson in which Mrs. Tilscher describes the course of the Nile as it runs through Africa. The speaker finds this relaxing and pleasant—in part, simply, because of the way Mrs. Tilscher delivers the lecture. Her voice is soothing and musical; the speaker describes it as a “chant,” almost a song.
In describing this lecture, the speaker addresses someone, calling that person simply “you.” Though the speaker never explicitly says so, it seems clear that this “you” is the speaker themselves. In other words, the speaker is an adult reflecting back on their time in school. The recollection is so powerful that the speaker begins to address their younger self, calling them “you.” This suggests that the speaker feels very distant from their youth: so much so that, when the speaker thinks of childhood, it’s almost like it happened to a different person.
The poem is written in free verse: it has no set rhyme scheme or meter. But the speaker uses other formal elements to carefully reconstruct the experience of being a child—in these lines, the experience of listening to Mrs. Tilscher lecture about the Nile. For example, the first two lines of the poem are enjambed. As a result, the sentence flows across the line breaks, just like the river Mrs. Tilscher describes. And the alliterative /t/ sound that appears in “travel,” “tracing,” and “Tilscher” further binds the lines together, making them even more liquid and smooth—while also giving the reader a taste of the chant-like quality of Mrs. Tilscher’s voice.
In line 4, the speaker uses four sentence fragments, each of which names a location on the Nile: "Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswân." The speaker doesn’t use a word like “then” or “next” to establish the relationship between these places, so these fragments are an example of parataxis. The reader has to figure out for themselves how they are connected. The speaker will rely on parataxis throughout the poem. Though it means different things at different points, here it mimics the speaker’s childhood experience of the lecture: grabbing on to certain things, ignoring the rest. In other words, the parataxis mimics the way children think and speak, jumping between ideas without always articulating the connections between them.
-
Lines 5-8
That for an ...
... a running child.
Unlock all 362 words of this analysis of Lines 5-8 of “In Mrs Tilscher’s Class,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
Plus so much more...
Get LitCharts A+ -
Lines 9-12
This was better ...
... of a mistake. -
Lines 13-16
Mrs Tilscher loved ...
... from another form. -
Lines 17-21
Over the Easter ...
... the lunch queue. -
Lines 21-23
A rough boy ...
... got back home. -
Lines 24-28
That feverish July, ...
... then turned away. -
Lines 28-30
Reports were handed ...
... into a thunderstorm.
-
-
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” Symbols
-
Sweet Shop
In line 10, the speaker compares Mrs. Tilscher’s classroom to a "sweet shop." The sweet shop symbolizes the comforts and joys of childhood.
"The classroom glowed like a sweet shop," says the speaker. In Britain, a “sweet shop” is a candy store. In other words, the speaker is using a simile to say that Mrs. Tilscher’s classroom is a very pleasant and happy place for a child—a place of indulgence and pleasure. In turn, the “sweet shop” becomes an important symbol in the poem. It symbolizes comfort, pleasure, and hope—everything sweet and indulgent that a child might wish for. Implicitly, it stands in contrast to some of the other things the speaker mentions in the stanza: darker, less pleasant things, like “home” and the child murderers “Brady and Hindley.”
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 10: “sweet shop”
-
Tadpoles
The tadpoles in the poem symbolize transformation. In lines 17-18, the speaker notes that, during Easter break, the classroom’s “tadpoles changed / from commas into exclamation marks.” The speaker is using a metaphor here, comparing the size and shape of the tadpoles' bodies to punctuation: after Easter, the “tadpoles” look like exclamation marks. This transformation foreshadows the other transformations the speaker describes: reaching adolescence, and learning about sex. In this sense, the “tadpoles” are also symbols for the schoolchildren themselves. Like the schoolchildren, the tadpoles aren’t full grown: their bodies are shifting and changing. And like the schoolchildren, those changes are shocking and disorienting. So much so that they’re best described with the grammatical mark that expresses shock and surprise: the exclamation mark.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 17: “tadpoles”
-
Thunderstorm
In line 30, the speaker describes leaving school for summer vacation just as a “thunderstorm” starts. This thunderstorm symbolizes the powerful emotions of adolescence.
The “thunderstorm” is a literal event: "You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown, / as the sky split open into a thunderstorm." There’s really a thunderstorm in the poem’s final line. But it’s also symbolic. A thunderstorm is a violent, chaotic event with wind, rain, thunder, and lighting. For the speaker, confused about sex, just entering adolescence, the “thunderstorm” is an apt symbol for his or her own violent and chaotic feelings. In other words, the “thunderstorm” is a symbol of adolescence with all its difficulties. As a symbol, it suggests that entering adolescence—and learning about sex—is not a pleasurable or peaceful experience. Instead, it is a violent, dangerous, and powerful experience: something that might end up damaging the people who have to endure it.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 30: “thunderstorm”
-
-
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
-
End-Stopped Line
In the first two stanzas of “In Mrs Tilscher’s Class,” the speaker uses end-stop often—but without any obvious pattern. For instance, the first two lines of the poem are enjambed. But then the speaker switches things up and starts using end-stop regularly: in lines 3-8 ("while Mrs Tilscher ... a running child"), every line except one is end-stopped.
The second stanza uses end-stop even more often: every line except 11 ("Sugar paper. Coloured shapes. Brady and Hindley") and 13 ("Mrs Tilscher loved you. Some mornings, you found") is end-stopped. This is partially due to the poem’s reliance on parataxis: many of the poem’s sentences are short fragments; they end with the end of the line. As a result, the poem feels both deliberate and jerky. The poise and control of the adult speaker is disrupted by his or her imitation of the quick jumps in logic that children make as they play and talk.
In the poem’s final two stanzas, the speaker describes moving from childhood to adolescence: the speaker learns about sex and develops his or her own sexual desires. The poem’s use of enjambment and end-stop changes in these stanzas. Stanza 3 has only one end-stop, the final line. Becoming adolescent seems to upset the speaker in more ways than one: the poem ceases to be heavily end-stopped. It speeds up: becoming breathless and urgent as the speaker tries to negotiate the uncomfortable things he or she is learning.
Then, in the poem’s final stanza, the speaker almost exclusively uses end-stop—with just one enjambment, in line 26 ("You asked her / how you were born"). The switch between using almost all enjambments in stanza 3 and almost none in stanza 4 is surprising, even unsettling: but also reflects the speaker’s state of mind as he or she becomes an adolescent. Just as adolescents try out identities and styles, the speaker is trying—and quickly abandoning—different ways of organizing his or her poem.
Whereas the use of end-stop in the first two stanzas reflects the speaker’s childhood—the ways that children think and talk—the final two stanzas use end-stop in a different way: to reflect the instability and questioning of adolescence.
Where end-stopped line appears in the poem:- Line 3: “scenery.”
- Line 4: “Aswân.”
- Line 6: “dust.”
- Line 7: “pole.”
- Line 8: “child.”
- Line 9: “books.”
- Line 10: “shop.”
- Line 12: “mistake.”
- Line 14: “name.”
- Line 15: “shaved.”
- Line 16: “form.”
- Line 19: “dunce,”
- Line 23: “home.”
- Line 24: “electricity.”
- Line 25: “hot,”
- Line 27: “smiled,”
- Line 28: “out.”
- Line 29: “grown,”
- Line 30: “thunderstorm.”
-
Enjambment
Unlock all 280 words of this analysis of Enjambment in “In Mrs Tilscher’s Class,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
Plus so much more...
Get LitCharts A+ -
Caesura
-
Consonance
-
Assonance
-
Alliteration
-
Metaphor
-
Simile
-
Asyndeton
-
Parataxis
-
Allusion
-
-
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” 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.
- Blue Nile
- Chanted
- Tana
- Ethiopia
- Khartoum
- Aswân
- Skittle
- Laugh
- Sweet shop
- Brady and Hindley
- Shaved
- Form
- Dunce
- Queue
- Tangible
- Fractious
Blue Nile-
(Location in poem: Line 1: “Blue Nile”)
The Nile River, which runs through Africa from Tanzania in the South to Egypt in the North. The Nile is Africa’s longest river and one of the places where human civilization first blossomed. More specifically, the Blue Nile is one of two main tributaries of the Nile, so named because of the soil that turns it a dark color.
-
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “In Mrs Tilscher’s Class”
-
Form
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” is not written in any traditional form, like the sonnet or the villanelle. It does not have a regular meter or rhyme scheme. Instead, it is written in free verse. By the time Carol Ann Duffy wrote the poem in the late 1980s, free verse had become pretty standard for poets writing in English. In other words, the speaker isn't necessarily making an important argument by using free verse. Instead he or she is simply reflecting the poetic standards of his or her moment.
However, the poem does have an interesting and important formal pattern—something subtle that shapes the poem and reflects the speaker’s experience. The first two stanzas of the poem are each eight lines long—in other words, they are octaves. The final two stanzas are each seven lines, called septets. The final two stanzas are thus one line shorter than the first two stanzas.
These shorter stanzas are where the speaker discusses learning about sex, growing up, and becoming an adolescent. In the first two stanzas, the speaker meditates on the innocent pleasures of childhood. Compared to these longer stanzas, the final two stanzas feel a bit rushed, compressed—as though time itself speeds up as the speaker enters adolescence. The stanza length switches from an even number of lines to an odd number, as if the stanzas have become unbalanced. Meanwhile, the first two stanzas feel slow and luxurious, uncomplicated by the pressures of time, just like childhood.
-
Meter
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” is written in free verse, a kind of poetry that doesn’t have meter or a rhyme scheme. In the early 20th century, free verse was a radical rejection of poetic tradition. But by the time Duffy wrote “In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” in the late 1980s, it had become a tradition in itself. In other words, the use of free verse in Duffy’s poem isn’t necessarily rebellious or particularly radical.
Although there are no set limits on the number of syllables in each line, all of the poem’s lines have at least 8 syllables; only a few are longer than 12 syllables. Line 12 in the second stanza has 13 syllables ("faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake"). Line 17 in the third stanza also has 13 ("Over the Easter term, the inky tadpoles changed").
Additionally, the first three lines of the final stanza range from 13 to 16 syllables, thus including the longest lines in the poem:
That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity.
A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot,
fractious under the heavy, sexy sky. You asked herThese lines are as heavy as the sky they describe, dense with extra words and syllables. They stand out as a turning point in the speaker's life, as he or she becomes more and more engrossed by sexuality.
Yet even though these lines deviate from the poem's typical line length, they don't do so that wildly. Although the rhythm of the poem is flexible and variable, it thus remains within relatively firm boundaries. And it doesn’t disturb the basic expectations of English poetry—indeed, most poems written in English meters tend to have between 8 and 12 syllables per line. So though the poem doesn’t have meter, it also doesn’t break radically from the expectations associated with meter.
-
Rhyme Scheme
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” is a poem in free verse, which means that it doesn’t have a set rhyme scheme. And while some free verse poems do use rhyme occasionally and in unpredictable ways, “In Mrs. Tilscher’s Class” is almost entirely free from such rhymes. After all, the speaker is emulating the natural speaking voice of someone reflecting on their childhood. By avoiding the artificial constraint of rhyme, the speaker thus maintains that sense of everyday speech.
The second stanza does contain a faint series of slant rhymes created by the assonance of the long /a/ sound in "mistake," "name," and "shaved." However, it's probably more useful to think of these moments as relating to the poem's general use of assonance, rather than in terms of rhyme. Thus, in general, “In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” avoids using rhyme, preferring to rely on other devices like assonance, parataxis, asyndeton, and alliteration to create its sense of rhythm and music.
-
-
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” Speaker
-
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” describes someone—whom the speaker only refers to as “you”—going through the awkward, difficult transition from childhood to adolescence. The speaker never tells the reader who the “you” is—nor does the speaker specify their gender. But the speaker does provide some important details that help the reader situate the speaker and the "you." For instance, the “you” is in school. And the speaker notes that the “you” worries about “Brady and Hindley”—a couple who abducted and murdered children in the north of England in the mid-1960s. So the poem is likely set sometime in the 1960s.
Since the poem was published in 1990—around 25 years after the Brady and Hindley murders—it seems like the speaker is reflecting on an earlier time, perhaps the time when the speaker him- or herself was in school, grappling with sexuality, and becoming an adolescent. Indeed, it seems likely that the “you” that the speaker addresses is the speaker: just a younger, less experienced version of the speaker. In other words, the speaker is an older person, someone who has already passed through adolescence and graduated from school.
The speaker is reflecting back on his or her experiences in school. And the speaker seems to feel like his or her younger self is almost a different person, addressing him or herself as "you" rather than "I." This suggests that the speaker feels cut off from his or her childhood and early adolescence; its pleasures, as well as its turmoil and confusion, are permanently in the past. The memories in the poem are things the speaker can reminisce about, but can’t return to.
-
-
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” Setting
-
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” is set in the United Kingdom in the mid-1960s. It’s most likely set in Scotland (where Carol Ann Duffy, the poet, was raised) or the north of England—where “Brady and Hindley” abducted and murdered children, and where their crimes were major local news in the 1960s. Though the poem considers a universal theme—the awkward process of learning about sex and becoming an adolescent—it is set in a very particular time and space. It emerges from the speaker's specific experience of becoming an adolescent.
In meditating on this theme—and on his or her own experience as a young adolescent—the speaker focuses on one place in particular: the classroom of a teacher named Mrs. Tilscher. The speaker describes the routines of this classroom in detail: snacks, lessons, sharpening pencils. The speaker depicts the classroom as a peaceful, protected space, full of innocent pleasures—at least until sex enters the picture.
The speaker is deeply engrossed in these innocent pleasures: his or her description of the classroom almost entirely excludes the other parts of his or her life. The reader doesn’t learn much about the speaker’s parents for instance, or his or her life at home—except that Mrs. Tilscher’s class is “better than home.” This suggests that the speaker’s home life might not be that happy or peaceful—that Mrs. Tilscher’s class is a kind of refuge from the world outside.
-
-
Literary and Historical Context of “In Mrs Tilscher’s Class”
Literary Context
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” was written in the late 1980s and published in 1990. In the early part of the 20th century, many poets had engaged in radical experiments—experiments that disrupted poetic traditions. By the time Duffy wrote this poem, however, many of those experiments were firmly in the past. Her poetry—like the poetry of many of her peers—is more relaxed, less obsessed with innovation and experimentation. Though she uses free verse, she doesn’t radically break with the expectations and patterns of English meter.
Instead, Duffy's poem describes a personal experience in vivid, evocative detail. This makes her poem a good example of a poetic movement called lyric narrative. Lyric narrative poems are usually in free verse, but they don’t do anything too crazy with the form. They are concerned with the details of everyday life, using those details to get at bigger, more universal themes. Lyric narrative writing represents one of the most important and widely celebrated forms of poetry written at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Indeed, Duffy’s poems have elevated her to some of the highest and most prestigious positions in poetry. For example, in 2009, Duffy was appointed Britain’s Poet Laureate—the first woman and first openly LGBTQ poet to hold the position.
Historical Context
“In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” depicts Scotland or the North of England in the mid-1960s, when the speaker of the poem was a school-aged child. The poem focuses on the details of life in the classroom of Mrs. Tilscher. It rarely glances outward to think about its broader social context. And when it does, it thinks about the kind of event that might interest or concern a child—like the “Brady and Hindley” murders, which took place around Manchester in the 1960s. These murders were constantly in the news in the North of England and in Scotland at that time. The speaker’s awareness of them indicates that he or she is paying attention to the news—but only to the extent that it concerns him or her.
However, there were larger transformations going on in English and Scottish society during the years the poem describes, changes that the speaker doesn’t fully acknowledge. The country was rebuilding after the devastation of World War II—in some cases, rebuilding entire towns from scratch. The government was highly involved in this rebuilding effort; as a result, this period is often known as post-war socialism. In order to fund the reconstruction, there were often shortages and key goods were rationed. In other words, this was a difficult period for the country—a period where people were required to make great sacrifices after a devastating war.
Though the speaker doesn’t explicitly acknowledge these challenges, one might find evidence of them implicitly written into the poem. For instance, the speaker consistently describes the pleasures of Mrs. Tilscher’s class in terms of food, comparing it to a “sweet shop” and celebrating a “skittle of milk.” This might reflect the food rationing that sometimes happened in those years. The shortage of food makes Mrs. Tilscher’s classroom with its snacks seem like an especially safe and welcoming place.
-
More “In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” Resources
-
External Resources
-
Brady and Hindley — An article on the Brady and Hindley murders from the Telegraph.
-
The SRB Interview: Carol Ann Duffy — A recent interview with Carol Ann Duffy and the Scottish Review of Books.
-
Biography of Carol Ann Duffy — A detailed biography of Carol Ann Duffy from the Poetry Foundation.
-
Winning Lines — A 2002 profile of Carol Ann Duffy from The Guardian Newspaper.
-
"In Mrs Tilscher's Class" at the BBC — A detailed exploration of the themes of "In Mrs Tilscher's Class" from the BBC.
-
-
LitCharts on Other Poems by Carol Ann Duffy
-
