I Come From

The poem 'I come from' has constant theme of identity throughout it, and it seems to be about a man thinking about his life while on a train journey, as the first and last lines are about trains.
This seems to suggest that he spends a lot of his life 'waiting forever for the train to London'.
He says that while the train to London comes from 'smashed windows' and 'graffiti', he himself come from 'clean handkerchiefs' and 'dinner money'. This suggests that his childhood is large part of his identity because he s thinking of the dinner money for his lunch when he went to school.

It is also suggested that a large part of his identity is about collecting things, as well as enjoying the outdoors as he has 'an almost complete set of Observer I-Spy books'. However since his collection isn't complete, it could suggest that he has been neglecting his passion for the outdoors lately, maybe due to spending too much time working in London.

The line saying that he comes from 'recorders, clarinets, a pianola', suggests that music is also a large part of his identity, however he also comes from 'silence' as well, which could suggest that he doesn't have very much time for i anymore.

Part of his identity is also from watching his 'father mowing the lawn in the dark' which is followed by another two lines about his garden when he was a child, suggesting that it was a large part of his life.

Overall, the speaker in 'I come from' creates a sense of his identity by reminiscing about hings that he enjoyed during his childhood and his childhood home, and using the contrast between living in the suburbs and living in London to show how homesick he feels and the differences in his life and identity.