The Graduates - The Analysis

So to the poem, The Graduates, which was written when I was in my 30s. I was  the only member of my family to go to university, a common enough experience for my generation. I studied philosophy. Perhaps if things had been different for my mother,  she might have gone. (She comes from a long line of coal miners, poor, work-hardened people).  My family were proud, a bit anxious maybe, because the concern was that we ‘get on’ and ‘do well’, and messing about for four years studying philosophy seemed to offer no direct route to a good job. (That’s one of the reasons I chose it – studying English, the obvious option, seemed to offer only a one way ticket into school-teaching.) But, with every decency and some sacrifice, they found the money and, after a lot of bother with exams, I got in, studied, and in due course graduated.

Graduating – how many family homes have photo’s of their offspring in academic gowns, clutching degrees, that passport to a better life!  All over Europe, Africa, Asia, America – everywhere.  And yet...something happens to the ‘educated’. You change. You are not the person you were. For one thing, if you’re Scots (Welsh, Cockney, Yorkshire) you have to speak differently. ‘Properly’.  Like it or no, you have to lose the robust, homely dialect you began with. Else the academics are mildly amused, or simply don’t understand you, or the posh kids sneer. 

They say the past is another country, but it seemed to me that the future was another country. It seemed that graduating, becoming ‘educated’, was like....emigrating. It was like making a long journey to another country, where one spoke in a different way, where options were more, opportunities greater. Except, of course, I stayed in Scotland. Going to university meant I had emigrated to graduate-land. To make that journey, to graduate, meant that the past, which was small, poor, homely, limited, ‘couthy’, as the Scots say, had to be forsaken.

The poem opens ‘If I chose children’ – mindful that I had a choice in that matter, as women of every generation before had no choice. ‘Knock with a brass kilted piper’ – the door to my grandmother’s tenement flat had a knocker in the shape of a bag-piper. So familiar to me, that black-painted door, so Scottish the piper! And inside were ornaments on the mantelpiece, china milkmaids harking back to a contented pastoral past, and that language, the fulsome dialect which, as I predicted, my own children, though raised in Scotland,  neither speak nor understand. It’s a poem about change and overcoming; class movement, guilt, loss. (The word ‘lost’ occurs twice in the poem). It’s an ambivalent poem,  and a bit elegiac, but being Scottish and not given to displays of  emotion, I’ve kept it tightly reined in and  controlled.