Life & Wisdom Quote by Helen Dunmore

“Apprenticeship” is the sting in Helen Dunmore’s sentence: a quietly corrective word that demotes the romantic myth of the poet-as-natural-genius and replaces it with a trade. You don’t drift into craft; you’re trained by it, bruised by it, disciplined into it. Coming from a working poet and novelist, the line carries an insider’s impatience with the idea that poetry is just feeling poured onto a page. Dunmore is talking about labor, not inspiration.

“Tough” does double duty. It gestures to technique - meter, line breaks, compression, the ruthless art of choosing one word over ten - but it also hints at a moral and emotional education. Words are not neutral tools; they have histories, class signals, political baggage, private triggers. To “use” them well means learning what they do to other people, what they expose about you, and how easily they lie. The apprenticeship isn’t only learning to sing; it’s learning when to shut up, when to cut, when to resist the cheap clarifying phrase that would make a poem behave.

The subtext is also a defense of difficulty in a culture that rewards speed and “content.” Poetry, in Dunmore’s framing, is slow because it’s accountable. It demands the humility of training and the stamina to revise, again and again, until language stops being decoration and starts being precision. That’s why the line lands: it dignifies the struggle without sentimentalizing it, insisting that the price of verbal power is time spent earning it.