Émigrée by

Question 1

The poem in a nutshell….

Answer 1

The speaker is an adult living in exile looking back at the city in which they spent their childhood. Despite their understanding that ‘it may be sick with tyrants’, the speaker cannot but see it as a good place—they are ‘branded by an impression of sunlight’, even though it is
unattainable—perhaps because it never existed.

Question 2

Context

Answer 2

The city is never specified, and it could be any one of many places throughout history where people have
had to go into exile because of a change of regime or natural disaster—recent examples might be Tehran,
Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut, Baghdad, Sarajevo

Poem is from Rumens’s 1993 collection Thinking of Skins

Question 3

‘There once was a country…’

Answer 3

An echo of the opening of conventional children’s stories: ‘Once upon a time…’ or ‘Long ago and far away…’

Question 4

‘branded by an impression of sunlight’

Answer 4

‘Branded’ is a word torn with ambiguity: it is a sign of being owned, and it is a way of marking out as having a particular bad or shameful quality

Question 5

‘bright, filled paperweight’

Answer 5

The memory has no more value than a trinket with no

lasting value

Question 6

Aspects of Power or Conflict

Answer 6

There is a conflict between memory and reality—the speaker acknowledges that their memories are not
their own

It is, like the Garden of Eden, a place the speaker is locked out of—‘I have no passport’; it is unattainable, a
‘land of lost content’1

It’s a poem about human limitation

Question 7

Poems that can be linked

Answer 7

From ‘The Prelude’
‘Ozymandias’
London