What the exam asks
- Paper 2 (comparative essay, 25 marks): You write without the text, comparing Duffy’s poems (normally two or three poems to represent the collection as one work) with another literary work. Criterion B1 (5 marks) rewards analysing both small-scale language choices and broader structural choices; Criterion B2 (5 marks) rewards explaining why the two works agree or differ.
- Individual oral (40 marks): Because ‘Originally’ is 24 lines long, the entire poem fits within the 40-line extract limit, paired with a global issue such as how migration and language assimilation reshape personal identity.
- HL essay (20 marks): You can trace a line of inquiry across several of Duffy’s poems—for instance, how she uses shifts in pronouns and unresolved final lines to challenge fixed ideas of selfhood.
Core ideas
Three-part structure and pronoun shifts
Duffy builds the poem across three unrhymed eight-line stanzas. While Duffy herself moved from Glasgow to England as a child, the poem works as a universal meditation on growing up and losing one’s first home. Each stanza marks a stage of displacement and shifts its guiding pronoun:
| Stanza | Stage of displacement | Key pronouns | Effect on meaning and reader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stanza 1 | The journey: leaving the first home by train | “We”, “our”, “I” | Begins inside the shared family unit (“our own country”), then isolates the silent speaker holding a toy at the stanza’s end. |
| Stanza 2 | The arrival: hostility and foreignness in the new environment | “you”, “Your”, “My”, “I” | The second-person “you” generalises childhood as universal uprooting and pulls the reader into the anxiety of having the “wrong” accent. |
| Stanza 3 | Afterwards: assimilation, loss and adult doubt | “you”, “I” | Moves from the generalised process of forgetting back to an adult “I” who sounds like everyone else yet cannot answer a simple question about origins. |
Unmarked speech and the unresolved ending
Duffy weaves spoken words directly into the lines without quotation marks—from the brothers crying “Home, / Home” (stanza 1, lines 4–5) to the child’s plea “I want our own country, I said” (stanza 2, line 8) and the strangers’ question “Originally?” (stanza 3, line 8). By stripping away speech marks, she turns memory into a single continuous stream where past voices and present doubts bleed into one another. Instead of a neat resolution, the poem ends on a hesitation that leaves identity open.