In Saint Mark’s Gospel in the Bible, Salome (The historian Josephus tells us her name) was the woman who asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. John the Baptist was the man who baptised Christ in the River Jordan having prophesied the arrival of a Saviour. He also spent a long period of self denial in the desert, eating only locusts and honey. This paralleled Christ’s forty-day fast in the desert.
The poem imagines Salome as a woman who has had more than one man’s head severed on a whim: “I’d done it before” (line 1) It seems that she is a drinker and drug taker who was so immersed in her ways that she couldn’t even remember the name of the man she had asked to be beheaded: “What was his name? Peter? / Simon? Andrew? John?” (lines 14-15). All these names are, of course, those of some of Jesus’s disciples.
Duffy imagines Salome as being the equivalent in our modern terms as a self-obsessed person who lives a life of excess and who later decides to reform. As Salome says “I needed to clean up my act” (line 25). The predatory nature of Salome is encapsulated in the idea that she thinks that John the Baptist had come “like a lamb to the slaughter / to Salome’s bed.” This is the language of sexual conquest but it is actually referring to the fact that John was indeed slaughtered. The Bible account tells us that Salome was given John the Baptist’s head on a platter. This is horrific and is rendered into a modern context by Duffy who clearly has in mind the kind of tribally brutal killings of the Mafia and, most forcibly, the famous scene if the film, The Godfather in which a Mafioso is a sent a warning by a mobster in the form of the severed head of his racehorse in his bed.
Duffy builds up to the description of the well known platter image through words that rhyme or half rhyme with “platter”. For example, “flatter”, “pewter”, “better”, “butter”, “clatter”, “clutter”, “patter”, “latter” and “slaughter”. Salome’s utter callousness is made clear in her appalling “and ain’t life a bitch”. She is so corrupt that she cannot feel anything but indifference to what she has done. The focus of her attention is not the series of murders for which she has been responsible but her own situation, her need to eat more wisely and “get fitter”. Salome is a repugnant person who is clearly ignorant about, or indifferent to, the magnitude of what she has done.
In a general sense this poem is a study of a personality who is utterly amoral with nothing but herself as a focus in life.
The following is the relevant section from St Mark’s Gospel (Chapter VI verses 17-29)
17. For Herod himself had given orders to have John arrested, and he had him bound and put in prison. He did this because of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, whom he had married.
18. For John had been saying to Herod, "It is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife."
19. So Herodias nursed a grudge against John and wanted to kill him. But she was not able to,
20. because Herod feared John and protected him, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man. When Herod heard John, he was greatly puzzled; yet he liked to listen to him.
21. Finally the opportune time came. On his birthday Herod gave a banquet for his high officials and military commanders and the leading men of Galilee.
22. When the daughter of Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his dinner guests. The king said to the girl, "Ask me for anything you want, and I'll give it to you."
23. And he promised her with an oath, "Whatever you ask I will give you, up to half my kingdom."
24. She went out and said to her mother, "What shall I ask for?" "The head of John the Baptist," she answered.
25. At once the girl hurried in to the king with the request: "I want you to give me right now the head of John the Baptist on a platter."
26. The king was greatly distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he did not want to refuse her.
27. So he immediately sent an executioner with orders to bring John's head. The man went, beheaded John in the prison,
28. and brought back his head on a platter. He presented it to the girl, and she gave it to her mother.
29. On hearing of this, John's disciples came and took his body and laid it in a tomb.
Showing posts with label Carol Ann Duffy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carol Ann Duffy. Show all posts
Sunday, 15 March 2009
Michael Woods writes about Before You Were Mine
In this poem Duffy addresses her mother, framing the time element in a curious way so that she inhabits with her voice the ten-year period before she was born. Speaking in the voice of her pre-existent self, she addresses her mother during the ten-year period preceding her own birth. She is exploring real time but a time that can only be imagined as far as she is concerned. Through specific detail she reconstructs the life her mother led before her daughter’s birth.
The title of the poem is surprising in that it suggests something a mother might say to a child rather than the other way around. The word ‘mine’ suggests closeness in a relationship and a sense of loving ownership.
In stanza 1 Duffy employs the first person in order to address her mother who is carefree and happy. There is an almost ghostly effect created by the child speaking to the parent before it is born. The sentence ‘I’m not here yet’, which opens the second stanza, is characteristic of Duffy’s treatment of time and creates tension between the present and an anticipated future. These ideas are, of course, projected imaginatively into the past of the poet’s mother.
The seemingly arbitrary sequence of events that led to the existence of us all are somehow short-circuited and lent a kind of inevitability by the background presence of the poet. This is clearly perceptible even though the ‘thought’ of a daughter does not enter her head while she dances in ‘the ballroom with the thousand eyes’, a reference to the presence of five hundred potential husbands watching her. The hoped-for future of the mother is framed in terms of ‘fizzy, movie tomorrows / the right walk home could bring’. The word ‘fizzy’ suggests zest for life and excitement (compare this with ‘fizzing hope’ in ‘The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team’) as much as capturing the rather hissy soundtracks and the sometimes less than sharp picture quality of early films. The ‘movie tomorrows’ indicate the way young women hoped that their lives would become real life versions of the films they flocked to see.
The third stanza intensifies the sense of the mother’s freedom as her child to be reminds her that she arrived, like all babies, with a ‘loud, possessive yell’. The easy, conversational tone of the sentence finishing with ‘eh?’ underlines the intimacy of a relationship that has been developing for a long time. Duffy turns her attention to the memory of being a little girl doing such things as putting her hands in her mother’s ‘high-heeled red shoes’. Such an action is fairly typical of what a little girl might do and enables the reader to identify easily with the situation described. The shoes are ‘relics’, a word that emphasises the gulf of time between the event remembered and the occasion of its recall; it also has a religious connotation implying that the shoes are very special because of their association with the poet’s mother. The stanza closes with the poet vividly imagining her youthful mother as she revisits her old Glasgow haunt: ‘and now your ghost clatters toward me over George Square / till I see you, clear as scent’. By employing the technique of synaesthesia, Duffy replicates for the reader the vividness of her seemingly visionary experience of her mother. Scent is unmistakable and almost always associated in our minds with a person and a place. As well as sight, the poet is relying on smell, the most evocative of our senses.
The final stanza continues to catalogue the details of childhood memory, the poet fondly recalling the learning of dance steps ‘on the way home from Mass’. The image of ‘stamping stars from the wrong pavement’ conjures pictures of Hollywood but reminds us that there is no escaping real life. ‘Even then’ suggests that the child yearned for her mother even before she was born. This is a tremendously confirmatory idea and it is clear that ‘love lasts’ for the poet and her mother in the real present as well as the imagined past. The final sentence, peppered with words like ‘glamorous’, ‘sparkle’, ‘waltz’ and ‘laugh’ suggests youth and enjoyment and signals that, unlike many daughters, the poet can imagine a life for her mother without the children she was later to bear. The final phrase of the poem, which contains a repetition of its title, reminds us of its ambiguity. Duffy evokes the Glasgow of the 1950s with its dance halls and fashions influenced by American icons like Marilyn Monroe. The ‘polka-dot dress’ mentioned in the first stanza recalls two famous photographs, one of Monroe strategically stepping over a hot air vent, which caused her dress to fly up, and another called ‘Seaside Chat’ by the photographer Bert Hardy. The women in the latter wear dresses similar to Monroe’s while the photograph is clearly influenced by the image of her. The image Duffy creates of her mother with her friends is an idealised, imaginary one, even the names are invented. This is wholly in keeping with the way children try to reconstruct their parents’ lives through images already available. Such images often do include photographs.
The poet imagines her mother risking ‘a hiding’ from her mother (the poet’s grandmother) for arriving home late from a dance. This indicates clearly that the relationship between parents and children does not differ significantly from one generation to the next.
The title of the poem is surprising in that it suggests something a mother might say to a child rather than the other way around. The word ‘mine’ suggests closeness in a relationship and a sense of loving ownership.
In stanza 1 Duffy employs the first person in order to address her mother who is carefree and happy. There is an almost ghostly effect created by the child speaking to the parent before it is born. The sentence ‘I’m not here yet’, which opens the second stanza, is characteristic of Duffy’s treatment of time and creates tension between the present and an anticipated future. These ideas are, of course, projected imaginatively into the past of the poet’s mother.
The seemingly arbitrary sequence of events that led to the existence of us all are somehow short-circuited and lent a kind of inevitability by the background presence of the poet. This is clearly perceptible even though the ‘thought’ of a daughter does not enter her head while she dances in ‘the ballroom with the thousand eyes’, a reference to the presence of five hundred potential husbands watching her. The hoped-for future of the mother is framed in terms of ‘fizzy, movie tomorrows / the right walk home could bring’. The word ‘fizzy’ suggests zest for life and excitement (compare this with ‘fizzing hope’ in ‘The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team’) as much as capturing the rather hissy soundtracks and the sometimes less than sharp picture quality of early films. The ‘movie tomorrows’ indicate the way young women hoped that their lives would become real life versions of the films they flocked to see.
The third stanza intensifies the sense of the mother’s freedom as her child to be reminds her that she arrived, like all babies, with a ‘loud, possessive yell’. The easy, conversational tone of the sentence finishing with ‘eh?’ underlines the intimacy of a relationship that has been developing for a long time. Duffy turns her attention to the memory of being a little girl doing such things as putting her hands in her mother’s ‘high-heeled red shoes’. Such an action is fairly typical of what a little girl might do and enables the reader to identify easily with the situation described. The shoes are ‘relics’, a word that emphasises the gulf of time between the event remembered and the occasion of its recall; it also has a religious connotation implying that the shoes are very special because of their association with the poet’s mother. The stanza closes with the poet vividly imagining her youthful mother as she revisits her old Glasgow haunt: ‘and now your ghost clatters toward me over George Square / till I see you, clear as scent’. By employing the technique of synaesthesia, Duffy replicates for the reader the vividness of her seemingly visionary experience of her mother. Scent is unmistakable and almost always associated in our minds with a person and a place. As well as sight, the poet is relying on smell, the most evocative of our senses.
The final stanza continues to catalogue the details of childhood memory, the poet fondly recalling the learning of dance steps ‘on the way home from Mass’. The image of ‘stamping stars from the wrong pavement’ conjures pictures of Hollywood but reminds us that there is no escaping real life. ‘Even then’ suggests that the child yearned for her mother even before she was born. This is a tremendously confirmatory idea and it is clear that ‘love lasts’ for the poet and her mother in the real present as well as the imagined past. The final sentence, peppered with words like ‘glamorous’, ‘sparkle’, ‘waltz’ and ‘laugh’ suggests youth and enjoyment and signals that, unlike many daughters, the poet can imagine a life for her mother without the children she was later to bear. The final phrase of the poem, which contains a repetition of its title, reminds us of its ambiguity. Duffy evokes the Glasgow of the 1950s with its dance halls and fashions influenced by American icons like Marilyn Monroe. The ‘polka-dot dress’ mentioned in the first stanza recalls two famous photographs, one of Monroe strategically stepping over a hot air vent, which caused her dress to fly up, and another called ‘Seaside Chat’ by the photographer Bert Hardy. The women in the latter wear dresses similar to Monroe’s while the photograph is clearly influenced by the image of her. The image Duffy creates of her mother with her friends is an idealised, imaginary one, even the names are invented. This is wholly in keeping with the way children try to reconstruct their parents’ lives through images already available. Such images often do include photographs.
The poet imagines her mother risking ‘a hiding’ from her mother (the poet’s grandmother) for arriving home late from a dance. This indicates clearly that the relationship between parents and children does not differ significantly from one generation to the next.
Michael Woods writes about Education for Leisure
A disaffected, unemployed boy searching for ways of filling a day of extreme boredom decides to kill something. Having killed a fly by squashing it against a window, his killing instinct extends to flushing a goldfish down a toilet. He craves more excitement and leaves his house, clutching a bread knife. The poem closes with the terrifying idea that anyone could fall victim to a random attack by such a person.
It would be too easy to read this poem as a criticism of psychopaths as it draws attention to the potential effects of poor employment prospects. The irony of the title illustrates how school does not lead to employment for many young people but to protracted periods of 'leisure'. One might go as far as to say that 'leisure' is simply a euphemism for idleness. There is a simultaneous horror and sympathy communicated in the poem.
The strong narrative impulse in the poem, written in the voice of the boy, is striking. Feeling frustrated and 'ignored', he resorts to physical violence as a means of exerting power over others. He assumes absolute authority by deciding to, 'play God'.
He does not understand Shakespeare but claims to be a genius. This is an allusion to King Lear, perhaps Shakespeare's darkest tragedy. It recalls Gloucester's words, 'As flies to wanton boys, are we to the Gods, / they kill us for their sport' (Act 4, Scene 1). The act of killing the fly cost the boy no thought at all just as he holds the lives of his cat, goldfish and budgie cheap. In playing God, the boy is actually given some of God's words from Genesis to speak: 'I see that it is good' ironically reverses the import of God's reaction to his creation by showing us someone who is bent on destruction. The blackly comic, 'The budgie is panicking', along with 'The cat avoids me' provide temporary relief from the stark reality of what this person is bent on. He seeks attention and is not pleased that the people at the social security office do not acknowledge him in the way he would like. He associates himself with 'talent' and 'genius', telling a radio presenter that he is a superstar.
The final stanza ominously begins with the sentence, 'There is nothing left to kill'. This again reminds us of his anti-type, God who rested after creating everything. Here, the persona in the poem is searching for something or someone to destroy. Having failed to be famous for a while on radio, he decides to kind someone to stab. The penultimate line of the poem conveys the warped associations made in the mind of the homicidal boy: 'He cuts me off' clearly indicates that the boy has been dismissed as being deranged by the radio station receptionist. The word 'cut' clearly links with what he decides to do in taking a knife out onto the street. The arresting visual image of 'The pavements glitter suddenly' suggests both an odd flaring of decision to act in the mind of the potential murderer and, by transference, the flash of the blade as it catches the light. 'I touch your arm' is both sinister in its controlled intimacy and ironically reductive since it is not the hand of a creative God reaching out but that of a killer.
The poem does not defend this sort of person's actions but does raise questions about the potential effects of unemployment and alienation born of an inappropriate school curriculum for those who would do better learning more practical subjects. In this way it is a sobering reminder of what disaffection can lead to.
Duffy captures the 'voice' of the boy in his characteristic vocabulary. After the opening stanza's statements of intent: 'I am going to kill something' and 'I am going to play God', Duffy moves from the future indicative to the simple present: 'I squash', 'I pour', 'I pull', and 'I touch'. The stark, unembellished short sentences indicate a determination to act. His resentment is also suggested through these clipped statements.
It would be too easy to read this poem as a criticism of psychopaths as it draws attention to the potential effects of poor employment prospects. The irony of the title illustrates how school does not lead to employment for many young people but to protracted periods of 'leisure'. One might go as far as to say that 'leisure' is simply a euphemism for idleness. There is a simultaneous horror and sympathy communicated in the poem.
The strong narrative impulse in the poem, written in the voice of the boy, is striking. Feeling frustrated and 'ignored', he resorts to physical violence as a means of exerting power over others. He assumes absolute authority by deciding to, 'play God'.
He does not understand Shakespeare but claims to be a genius. This is an allusion to King Lear, perhaps Shakespeare's darkest tragedy. It recalls Gloucester's words, 'As flies to wanton boys, are we to the Gods, / they kill us for their sport' (Act 4, Scene 1). The act of killing the fly cost the boy no thought at all just as he holds the lives of his cat, goldfish and budgie cheap. In playing God, the boy is actually given some of God's words from Genesis to speak: 'I see that it is good' ironically reverses the import of God's reaction to his creation by showing us someone who is bent on destruction. The blackly comic, 'The budgie is panicking', along with 'The cat avoids me' provide temporary relief from the stark reality of what this person is bent on. He seeks attention and is not pleased that the people at the social security office do not acknowledge him in the way he would like. He associates himself with 'talent' and 'genius', telling a radio presenter that he is a superstar.
The final stanza ominously begins with the sentence, 'There is nothing left to kill'. This again reminds us of his anti-type, God who rested after creating everything. Here, the persona in the poem is searching for something or someone to destroy. Having failed to be famous for a while on radio, he decides to kind someone to stab. The penultimate line of the poem conveys the warped associations made in the mind of the homicidal boy: 'He cuts me off' clearly indicates that the boy has been dismissed as being deranged by the radio station receptionist. The word 'cut' clearly links with what he decides to do in taking a knife out onto the street. The arresting visual image of 'The pavements glitter suddenly' suggests both an odd flaring of decision to act in the mind of the potential murderer and, by transference, the flash of the blade as it catches the light. 'I touch your arm' is both sinister in its controlled intimacy and ironically reductive since it is not the hand of a creative God reaching out but that of a killer.
The poem does not defend this sort of person's actions but does raise questions about the potential effects of unemployment and alienation born of an inappropriate school curriculum for those who would do better learning more practical subjects. In this way it is a sobering reminder of what disaffection can lead to.
Duffy captures the 'voice' of the boy in his characteristic vocabulary. After the opening stanza's statements of intent: 'I am going to kill something' and 'I am going to play God', Duffy moves from the future indicative to the simple present: 'I squash', 'I pour', 'I pull', and 'I touch'. The stark, unembellished short sentences indicate a determination to act. His resentment is also suggested through these clipped statements.
Michael Woods writes about Elvis' Twin Sister
The poem is a humorous dramatic monologue in the voice of an imagined twin sister for Elvis Presley who also happened to be a nun. Elvis had a twin brother who died in childbirth and Duffy imagines the twin surviving but as a girl. She grows up to follow a very different vocation from Elvis. He chose the public life of a rock star whereas she chose the private, contemplative life of a nun. Elvis himself came from the Southern States of America, Memphis, Tennessee with a strong gospel tradition in music.
The opening of the poem is comic in that there is incongruity in the use of language by Elvis’s twin sister: “In the convent y’all (line 1) is folksy and familiar, a bit like Elvis introducing one of his songs. She tells the reader that she prays for “the immortal soul / of rock and roll” (lines 4-5). By this she could be speaking of rock and roll in general or perhaps the soul of her dead brother who epitomised rock and roll because he was the first real star in the genre. The second stanza continues the tone of levity by humorously presenting Elvis’s twin telling the reader that she is called “Sister Presley” and that “The Reverend Mother / digs the way I move my hips/ just like my brother”. (lines 8-10) This libertine image contrasts sharply with the mention of “Gregorian chant” that “drifts out across the herbs”. There are no stacks of amplifiers and electric guitars in this garden of contemplation. Gregorian chant is restful and peaceful and could not be more different from the strident, raucous sound of rock and roll music. The line of Latin from the chant quoted in the poem, “Pascha nostrum immolatus est” (line 13) means ‘Our lamb has been sacrificed”. This is ambiguous in the context of the poem because it refers to the death of Jesus but Elvis’s twin sister could be speaking for the fans of Elvis, too. Unlike her brother, who wore expensive rhinestone and jewel encrusted catsuits, his sister wears a “simple habit” (line 14) and “darkish hues” (line 15), “a rosary” (line 17), “A chain of keys” (line 18)what seems an inevitable pair of “good and sturdy / blue suede shoes”. (lines 19-20). This is clearly in honour of Elvis.
The fact that she thinks of the convent as “Graceland”, the place where Elvis used to live and that she has the same “trademark slow lopsided smile” (line 24) as her brother makes him live on through her. The concluding stanza begins in much the same way as the first with an upbeat exclamation: “Lawdy” is a comical thing for a nun to say but just what Elvis might have said. It also reinforces how alike twins can be. Because it is Elvis’s word more than hers, the next line, “I’m alive and well.” (line 27) hints that he lives on through his music and by being commemorated in poems such as the one Duffy has written. His twin sister tells us that it is a “Long time” since she “walked / down Lonely Street / towards heartbreak Hotel.” (lines 28-30) This suggests that she is happy in life and carefree but it could also be a reminder to herself to go and listen to her brother’s records again, just as Duffy is clearly saying that Elvis’s contribution to popular culture should be recognised and celebrated, as it is in this poem. In some ways it may be read as an upbeat elegy. The original elegy resurrected its subject in a benign landscape and it could be argued that Duffy does just this in a convent herb garden. The rhyme in the poem helps it roll along and the short lines are reminiscent of a song in their stanzaic form.
The opening of the poem is comic in that there is incongruity in the use of language by Elvis’s twin sister: “In the convent y’all (line 1) is folksy and familiar, a bit like Elvis introducing one of his songs. She tells the reader that she prays for “the immortal soul / of rock and roll” (lines 4-5). By this she could be speaking of rock and roll in general or perhaps the soul of her dead brother who epitomised rock and roll because he was the first real star in the genre. The second stanza continues the tone of levity by humorously presenting Elvis’s twin telling the reader that she is called “Sister Presley” and that “The Reverend Mother / digs the way I move my hips/ just like my brother”. (lines 8-10) This libertine image contrasts sharply with the mention of “Gregorian chant” that “drifts out across the herbs”. There are no stacks of amplifiers and electric guitars in this garden of contemplation. Gregorian chant is restful and peaceful and could not be more different from the strident, raucous sound of rock and roll music. The line of Latin from the chant quoted in the poem, “Pascha nostrum immolatus est” (line 13) means ‘Our lamb has been sacrificed”. This is ambiguous in the context of the poem because it refers to the death of Jesus but Elvis’s twin sister could be speaking for the fans of Elvis, too. Unlike her brother, who wore expensive rhinestone and jewel encrusted catsuits, his sister wears a “simple habit” (line 14) and “darkish hues” (line 15), “a rosary” (line 17), “A chain of keys” (line 18)what seems an inevitable pair of “good and sturdy / blue suede shoes”. (lines 19-20). This is clearly in honour of Elvis.
The fact that she thinks of the convent as “Graceland”, the place where Elvis used to live and that she has the same “trademark slow lopsided smile” (line 24) as her brother makes him live on through her. The concluding stanza begins in much the same way as the first with an upbeat exclamation: “Lawdy” is a comical thing for a nun to say but just what Elvis might have said. It also reinforces how alike twins can be. Because it is Elvis’s word more than hers, the next line, “I’m alive and well.” (line 27) hints that he lives on through his music and by being commemorated in poems such as the one Duffy has written. His twin sister tells us that it is a “Long time” since she “walked / down Lonely Street / towards heartbreak Hotel.” (lines 28-30) This suggests that she is happy in life and carefree but it could also be a reminder to herself to go and listen to her brother’s records again, just as Duffy is clearly saying that Elvis’s contribution to popular culture should be recognised and celebrated, as it is in this poem. In some ways it may be read as an upbeat elegy. The original elegy resurrected its subject in a benign landscape and it could be argued that Duffy does just this in a convent herb garden. The rhyme in the poem helps it roll along and the short lines are reminiscent of a song in their stanzaic form.
Michael Woods writes about Anne Hathaway
This poem from The World’s Wife, written in the voice of Shakespeare’s widow, is immediately accessible because of its familiar tone and the manner in which Anne Hathaway enthuses about her dead husband. Despite its apparent simplicity, Duffy uses a rich complexity of ideas relating to language, relationships and Shakespeare’s work. She has chosen to adopt the sonnet form and this is particularly appropriate as Shakespeare himself adapted the form and wrote 154 of his own sonnets.
The poets Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47) were credited with introducing the sonnet to England. The standard form was known as the Petrarchan, Italian or regular sonnet, with a rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde, but it was modified thus by Shakespeare: ababacdcdefef gg. The volta is delayed in his sonnets until the final rhyming couplet although there is often a discernible change in direction at around line 8, the traditional position of the volta. Duffy’s rhyme scheme is looser than those already mentioned and employs half-rhyme, something in keeping with the ‘softer rhyme’ mentioned at the end of line 5 of this poem. The rhyming couplet conforms to the Shakespearean model but it does not introduce a new rhyme. By recalling ‘bed’ in line 8, the persona’s preoccupation with her physical relationship is brought to the reader’s attention.
It is fitting that Anne Hathaway writes in the form that her husband so famously used. This in itself is an act of homage and, possibly, a means of keeping him alive. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and ending with ‘So long lives this and this gives life to thee’, voices the commonly held view that humans might die but a work of art can last forever, effectively immortalising its subject.
Shakespeare, the arch metaphor-user and coiner of words, is written about in metaphorical terms even in the first line. The idea of a bed being a ‘spinning world’ is striking and starts the poem off at a giddying pace. Duffy neatly presents the bed as a microcosmic centre of an imaginative, expansive universe ‘of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas’ suggesting, at the very least, the plays As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet and The Tempest. As You Like It is set in the Forest of Arden, close to Stratford-upon-Avon; Macbeth and Hamlet are partly set in castles. Hamlet contemplates suicide on a clifftop and The Tempest involves a sea voyage. The image of Shakespeare diving in bed suggests oral sex with Anne Hathaway as well as reminding us that he was the man who wrote Ariel’s song in The Tempest.
It is significant that Anne Hathaway describes her husband as a ‘lover’ (line 3), suggesting that their physical relationship was vital and exciting. This is given further emphasis by the words ‘spinning’, ‘shooting’, ‘dancing’ and ‘laughing’. The vitality of their sexual union fits in well with the sort of people we might expect Anne and her husband to be.
Duffy begins with a quotation from Shakespeare’s will as an epigraph to the poem. Some commentators, and not only feminists, have taken the statement to be something of a slight on Anne Hathaway. To be left a ‘second best bed’ is not generally felt to have been complimentary. We might have expected, then, that Anne Hathaway would be given the opportunity to have her revenge. Although other poems in The World’s Wife do present women as being unhappy with their lot, Anne Hathaway’s version of events reveals that she was very much in love with her husband. Theirs was a marriage of equality. He left her his second best bed because it was the one in which they had enacted in a very real sense the drama of their relationship. No children are mentioned by Anne, she concentrates purely on the physical act and not its consequences.
In keeping with the expression of a separate identity, Anne Hathaway is presented as someone who is able to use words in an impressively poetic way. In this sense her personality rhymes with her husband’s. She refers to her body being a ‘softer rhyme’ to Shakespeare. Here, Duffy is subtly relating the poetic techniques of masculine rhyme and feminine rhyme to the actual lives of two people who could hardly be separated from art: ‘kisses’ at the end of line 4 is a feminine ending; ‘touch’ is a masculine one. This explicit use of linguistic and poetic terms draws attention to the self-conscious artifice of the persona’s utterance, as well as the poet’s.
Hathaway states that her lover’s words ‘echo’ as ‘assonance’ in her head. The words ‘on’, ‘body’, ‘softer’, ‘to’, ‘echo’, ‘assonance’, ‘touch’ and ‘noun’ are all linked by assonance; the ‘o’ sound does indeed echo through the lines as a softer rhyme. The description of Shakespeare’s touch as ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun’ creates a vital impression of joyous action. It is sexually suggestive in that his hands could be ‘dancing’ in the ‘centre’ of his wife. The line also alerts us to one of Shakespeare’s most famous means of energising language; he would often turn nouns into verbs. For example, in The Winter’s Tale Perdita says, ‘I’ll queen it no inch further.’ In a practically poetic sense, then, Shakespeare was able to find verbs in the centre of nouns. As is sometimes the case in Shakespeare’s sonnets, there is a perceptible progression in this sonnet with ‘Some nights’ (line 8), but the volta actually occurs after line 12 at the rhyming couplet, providing the clinching idea and sense of closure. This rhyme is, incidentally, masculine so we are aware of a female voice giving her husband something of a ghostly, lasting presence in its use. The metaphors in lines 8–9, ‘I dreamed he’d written me, the bed / a page beneath his writer’s hands’, are consistent with Shakespeare’s occupation but they also make a forceful statement about the imaginative power of his wife. She desires him so much that she would like to have been one of his dramatic creations. The bed as site of dramatic action is there as a blank for her husband’s imagination to be unleashed upon. Visually, sheets could easily be thought of as paper in this context. The blurring of the distinction between life and art is again inherent in this section of the poem. The subsequent ‘Romance / and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste’ is heavily erotic, concentrating on sensory exploration and not language itself. Lines 8–10 use theatrical imagery to powerful effect in presenting a scene of lovemaking. The word ‘drama’ makes reference to plays in general as well as to love, while ‘Romance’, one of the categories into which some of Shakespeare’s plays are placed, also reminds us that this relationship is not stale.
Anne relishes remembering that the ‘guests dozed on’ while she and William made love. The derogatory ‘dribbling their prose’ (line 12) is contrasted sharply with ‘My living laughing love’. The lilting alliteration and the cadence of the verse at this point convey extreme happiness and affection. This contrasts with the d, b and p, sounds in ‘dozed’, ‘dribbling’ and ‘prose’. The impression created is that the guests live an inferior life of prose. Shakespeare often gave low status characters prose to speak. The dash preceding the conclusion of the poem acts as something of a dramatic gesture and separates the descriptions of Shakespeare alive with Anne’s acknowledgement that he can only live on in her imagination now that he is dead. The fact that she describes her head as a ‘casket’, a strongbox for keeping jewels and other precious items, indicates the deep love and affection she had for her husband. The consonance on ‘hold’ and ‘held’ recalls that the lovers rhymed with each other when alive, while the tense-change poignantly signals the irrevocable change brought about by her husband’s death. The final, clinching rhyme of ‘head’ and ‘bed’ indicates that Anne Hathaway is able to keep love alive in her memory and imagination. We are left with Anne Hathaway cherishing the memory of being with her husband in ‘that next best bed’. Their true intimacy is made clear here as only she would have been able to interpret correctly Shakespeare’s intention when he wrote the famous bequest in his will. His will, in every sense, is hers.
This sonnet, then, is a poem about a poet by a poet, with the intermediary being the subject’s surviving partner. Carol Ann Duffy is using this thrown voice as a means of celebrating the subject, Shakespeare. Shakespeare delayed the volta in his sonnets until line twelve but there is often a discernible shift of ideas after the second quatrain, the point at which a Petrarchan sonnet displays a more noticeable turn.
The poets Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47) were credited with introducing the sonnet to England. The standard form was known as the Petrarchan, Italian or regular sonnet, with a rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde, but it was modified thus by Shakespeare: ababacdcdefef gg. The volta is delayed in his sonnets until the final rhyming couplet although there is often a discernible change in direction at around line 8, the traditional position of the volta. Duffy’s rhyme scheme is looser than those already mentioned and employs half-rhyme, something in keeping with the ‘softer rhyme’ mentioned at the end of line 5 of this poem. The rhyming couplet conforms to the Shakespearean model but it does not introduce a new rhyme. By recalling ‘bed’ in line 8, the persona’s preoccupation with her physical relationship is brought to the reader’s attention.
It is fitting that Anne Hathaway writes in the form that her husband so famously used. This in itself is an act of homage and, possibly, a means of keeping him alive. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and ending with ‘So long lives this and this gives life to thee’, voices the commonly held view that humans might die but a work of art can last forever, effectively immortalising its subject.
Shakespeare, the arch metaphor-user and coiner of words, is written about in metaphorical terms even in the first line. The idea of a bed being a ‘spinning world’ is striking and starts the poem off at a giddying pace. Duffy neatly presents the bed as a microcosmic centre of an imaginative, expansive universe ‘of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas’ suggesting, at the very least, the plays As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet and The Tempest. As You Like It is set in the Forest of Arden, close to Stratford-upon-Avon; Macbeth and Hamlet are partly set in castles. Hamlet contemplates suicide on a clifftop and The Tempest involves a sea voyage. The image of Shakespeare diving in bed suggests oral sex with Anne Hathaway as well as reminding us that he was the man who wrote Ariel’s song in The Tempest.
It is significant that Anne Hathaway describes her husband as a ‘lover’ (line 3), suggesting that their physical relationship was vital and exciting. This is given further emphasis by the words ‘spinning’, ‘shooting’, ‘dancing’ and ‘laughing’. The vitality of their sexual union fits in well with the sort of people we might expect Anne and her husband to be.
Duffy begins with a quotation from Shakespeare’s will as an epigraph to the poem. Some commentators, and not only feminists, have taken the statement to be something of a slight on Anne Hathaway. To be left a ‘second best bed’ is not generally felt to have been complimentary. We might have expected, then, that Anne Hathaway would be given the opportunity to have her revenge. Although other poems in The World’s Wife do present women as being unhappy with their lot, Anne Hathaway’s version of events reveals that she was very much in love with her husband. Theirs was a marriage of equality. He left her his second best bed because it was the one in which they had enacted in a very real sense the drama of their relationship. No children are mentioned by Anne, she concentrates purely on the physical act and not its consequences.
In keeping with the expression of a separate identity, Anne Hathaway is presented as someone who is able to use words in an impressively poetic way. In this sense her personality rhymes with her husband’s. She refers to her body being a ‘softer rhyme’ to Shakespeare. Here, Duffy is subtly relating the poetic techniques of masculine rhyme and feminine rhyme to the actual lives of two people who could hardly be separated from art: ‘kisses’ at the end of line 4 is a feminine ending; ‘touch’ is a masculine one. This explicit use of linguistic and poetic terms draws attention to the self-conscious artifice of the persona’s utterance, as well as the poet’s.
Hathaway states that her lover’s words ‘echo’ as ‘assonance’ in her head. The words ‘on’, ‘body’, ‘softer’, ‘to’, ‘echo’, ‘assonance’, ‘touch’ and ‘noun’ are all linked by assonance; the ‘o’ sound does indeed echo through the lines as a softer rhyme. The description of Shakespeare’s touch as ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun’ creates a vital impression of joyous action. It is sexually suggestive in that his hands could be ‘dancing’ in the ‘centre’ of his wife. The line also alerts us to one of Shakespeare’s most famous means of energising language; he would often turn nouns into verbs. For example, in The Winter’s Tale Perdita says, ‘I’ll queen it no inch further.’ In a practically poetic sense, then, Shakespeare was able to find verbs in the centre of nouns. As is sometimes the case in Shakespeare’s sonnets, there is a perceptible progression in this sonnet with ‘Some nights’ (line 8), but the volta actually occurs after line 12 at the rhyming couplet, providing the clinching idea and sense of closure. This rhyme is, incidentally, masculine so we are aware of a female voice giving her husband something of a ghostly, lasting presence in its use. The metaphors in lines 8–9, ‘I dreamed he’d written me, the bed / a page beneath his writer’s hands’, are consistent with Shakespeare’s occupation but they also make a forceful statement about the imaginative power of his wife. She desires him so much that she would like to have been one of his dramatic creations. The bed as site of dramatic action is there as a blank for her husband’s imagination to be unleashed upon. Visually, sheets could easily be thought of as paper in this context. The blurring of the distinction between life and art is again inherent in this section of the poem. The subsequent ‘Romance / and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste’ is heavily erotic, concentrating on sensory exploration and not language itself. Lines 8–10 use theatrical imagery to powerful effect in presenting a scene of lovemaking. The word ‘drama’ makes reference to plays in general as well as to love, while ‘Romance’, one of the categories into which some of Shakespeare’s plays are placed, also reminds us that this relationship is not stale.
Anne relishes remembering that the ‘guests dozed on’ while she and William made love. The derogatory ‘dribbling their prose’ (line 12) is contrasted sharply with ‘My living laughing love’. The lilting alliteration and the cadence of the verse at this point convey extreme happiness and affection. This contrasts with the d, b and p, sounds in ‘dozed’, ‘dribbling’ and ‘prose’. The impression created is that the guests live an inferior life of prose. Shakespeare often gave low status characters prose to speak. The dash preceding the conclusion of the poem acts as something of a dramatic gesture and separates the descriptions of Shakespeare alive with Anne’s acknowledgement that he can only live on in her imagination now that he is dead. The fact that she describes her head as a ‘casket’, a strongbox for keeping jewels and other precious items, indicates the deep love and affection she had for her husband. The consonance on ‘hold’ and ‘held’ recalls that the lovers rhymed with each other when alive, while the tense-change poignantly signals the irrevocable change brought about by her husband’s death. The final, clinching rhyme of ‘head’ and ‘bed’ indicates that Anne Hathaway is able to keep love alive in her memory and imagination. We are left with Anne Hathaway cherishing the memory of being with her husband in ‘that next best bed’. Their true intimacy is made clear here as only she would have been able to interpret correctly Shakespeare’s intention when he wrote the famous bequest in his will. His will, in every sense, is hers.
This sonnet, then, is a poem about a poet by a poet, with the intermediary being the subject’s surviving partner. Carol Ann Duffy is using this thrown voice as a means of celebrating the subject, Shakespeare. Shakespeare delayed the volta in his sonnets until line twelve but there is often a discernible shift of ideas after the second quatrain, the point at which a Petrarchan sonnet displays a more noticeable turn.
Michael Woods writes about Anne Hathaway
This poem from The World’s Wife, written in the voice of Shakespeare’s widow, is immediately accessible because of its familiar tone and the manner in which Anne Hathaway enthuses about her dead husband. Despite its apparent simplicity, Duffy uses a rich complexity of ideas relating to language, relationships and Shakespeare’s work. She has chosen to adopt the sonnet form and this is particularly appropriate as Shakespeare himself adapted the form and wrote 154 of his own sonnets.
The poets Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47) were credited with introducing the sonnet to England. The standard form was known as the Petrarchan, Italian or regular sonnet, with a rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde, but it was modified thus by Shakespeare: ababacdcdefef gg. The volta is delayed in his sonnets until the final rhyming couplet although there is often a discernible change in direction at around line 8, the traditional position of the volta. Duffy’s rhyme scheme is looser than those already mentioned and employs half-rhyme, something in keeping with the ‘softer rhyme’ mentioned at the end of line 5 of this poem. The rhyming couplet conforms to the Shakespearean model but it does not introduce a new rhyme. By recalling ‘bed’ in line 8, the persona’s preoccupation with her physical relationship is brought to the reader’s attention.
It is fitting that Anne Hathaway writes in the form that her husband so famously used. This in itself is an act of homage and, possibly, a means of keeping him alive. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and ending with ‘So long lives this and this gives life to thee’, voices the commonly held view that humans might die but a work of art can last forever, effectively immortalising its subject.
Shakespeare, the arch metaphor-user and coiner of words, is written about in metaphorical terms even in the first line. The idea of a bed being a ‘spinning world’ is striking and starts the poem off at a giddying pace. Duffy neatly presents the bed as a microcosmic centre of an imaginative, expansive universe ‘of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas’ suggesting, at the very least, the plays As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet and The Tempest. As You Like It is set in the Forest of Arden, close to Stratford-upon-Avon; Macbeth and Hamlet are partly set in castles. Hamlet contemplates suicide on a clifftop and The Tempest involves a sea voyage. The image of Shakespeare diving in bed suggests oral sex with Anne Hathaway as well as reminding us that he was the man who wrote Ariel’s song in The Tempest.
It is significant that Anne Hathaway describes her husband as a ‘lover’ (line 3), suggesting that their physical relationship was vital and exciting. This is given further emphasis by the words ‘spinning’, ‘shooting’, ‘dancing’ and ‘laughing’. The vitality of their sexual union fits in well with the sort of people we might expect Anne and her husband to be.
Duffy begins with a quotation from Shakespeare’s will as an epigraph to the poem. Some commentators, and not only feminists, have taken the statement to be something of a slight on Anne Hathaway. To be left a ‘second best bed’ is not generally felt to have been complimentary. We might have expected, then, that Anne Hathaway would be given the opportunity to have her revenge. Although other poems in The World’s Wife do present women as being unhappy with their lot, Anne Hathaway’s version of events reveals that she was very much in love with her husband. Theirs was a marriage of equality. He left her his second best bed because it was the one in which they had enacted in a very real sense the drama of their relationship. No children are mentioned by Anne, she concentrates purely on the physical act and not its consequences.
In keeping with the expression of a separate identity, Anne Hathaway is presented as someone who is able to use words in an impressively poetic way. In this sense her personality rhymes with her husband’s. She refers to her body being a ‘softer rhyme’ to Shakespeare. Here, Duffy is subtly relating the poetic techniques of masculine rhyme and feminine rhyme to the actual lives of two people who could hardly be separated from art: ‘kisses’ at the end of line 4 is a feminine ending; ‘touch’ is a masculine one. This explicit use of linguistic and poetic terms draws attention to the self-conscious artifice of the persona’s utterance, as well as the poet’s.
Hathaway states that her lover’s words ‘echo’ as ‘assonance’ in her head. The words ‘on’, ‘body’, ‘softer’, ‘to’, ‘echo’, ‘assonance’, ‘touch’ and ‘noun’ are all linked by assonance; the ‘o’ sound does indeed echo through the lines as a softer rhyme. The description of Shakespeare’s touch as ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun’ creates a vital impression of joyous action. It is sexually suggestive in that his hands could be ‘dancing’ in the ‘centre’ of his wife. The line also alerts us to one of Shakespeare’s most famous means of energising language; he would often turn nouns into verbs. For example, in The Winter’s Tale Perdita says, ‘I’ll queen it no inch further.’ In a practically poetic sense, then, Shakespeare was able to find verbs in the centre of nouns. As is sometimes the case in Shakespeare’s sonnets, there is a perceptible progression in this sonnet with ‘Some nights’ (line 8), but the volta actually occurs after line 12 at the rhyming couplet, providing the clinching idea and sense of closure. This rhyme is, incidentally, masculine so we are aware of a female voice giving her husband something of a ghostly, lasting presence in its use. The metaphors in lines 8–9, ‘I dreamed he’d written me, the bed / a page beneath his writer’s hands’, are consistent with Shakespeare’s occupation but they also make a forceful statement about the imaginative power of his wife. She desires him so much that she would like to have been one of his dramatic creations. The bed as site of dramatic action is there as a blank for her husband’s imagination to be unleashed upon. Visually, sheets could easily be thought of as paper in this context. The blurring of the distinction between life and art is again inherent in this section of the poem. The subsequent ‘Romance / and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste’ is heavily erotic, concentrating on sensory exploration and not language itself. Lines 8–10 use theatrical imagery to powerful effect in presenting a scene of lovemaking. The word ‘drama’ makes reference to plays in general as well as to love, while ‘Romance’, one of the categories into which some of Shakespeare’s plays are placed, also reminds us that this relationship is not stale.
Anne relishes remembering that the ‘guests dozed on’ while she and William made love. The derogatory ‘dribbling their prose’ (line 12) is contrasted sharply with ‘My living laughing love’. The lilting alliteration and the cadence of the verse at this point convey extreme happiness and affection. This contrasts with the d, b and p, sounds in ‘dozed’, ‘dribbling’ and ‘prose’. The impression created is that the guests live an inferior life of prose. Shakespeare often gave low status characters prose to speak. The dash preceding the conclusion of the poem acts as something of a dramatic gesture and separates the descriptions of Shakespeare alive with Anne’s acknowledgement that he can only live on in her imagination now that he is dead. The fact that she describes her head as a ‘casket’, a strongbox for keeping jewels and other precious items, indicates the deep love and affection she had for her husband. The consonance on ‘hold’ and ‘held’ recalls that the lovers rhymed with each other when alive, while the tense-change poignantly signals the irrevocable change brought about by her husband’s death. The final, clinching rhyme of ‘head’ and ‘bed’ indicates that Anne Hathaway is able to keep love alive in her memory and imagination. We are left with Anne Hathaway cherishing the memory of being with her husband in ‘that next best bed’. Their true intimacy is made clear here as only she would have been able to interpret correctly Shakespeare’s intention when he wrote the famous bequest in his will. His will, in every sense, is hers.
This sonnet, then, is a poem about a poet by a poet, with the intermediary being the subject’s surviving partner. Carol Ann Duffy is using this thrown voice as a means of celebrating the subject, Shakespeare. Shakespeare delayed the volta in his sonnets until line twelve but there is often a discernible shift of ideas after the second quatrain, the point at which a Petrarchan sonnet displays a more noticeable turn.
The poets Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47) were credited with introducing the sonnet to England. The standard form was known as the Petrarchan, Italian or regular sonnet, with a rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde, but it was modified thus by Shakespeare: ababacdcdefef gg. The volta is delayed in his sonnets until the final rhyming couplet although there is often a discernible change in direction at around line 8, the traditional position of the volta. Duffy’s rhyme scheme is looser than those already mentioned and employs half-rhyme, something in keeping with the ‘softer rhyme’ mentioned at the end of line 5 of this poem. The rhyming couplet conforms to the Shakespearean model but it does not introduce a new rhyme. By recalling ‘bed’ in line 8, the persona’s preoccupation with her physical relationship is brought to the reader’s attention.
It is fitting that Anne Hathaway writes in the form that her husband so famously used. This in itself is an act of homage and, possibly, a means of keeping him alive. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and ending with ‘So long lives this and this gives life to thee’, voices the commonly held view that humans might die but a work of art can last forever, effectively immortalising its subject.
Shakespeare, the arch metaphor-user and coiner of words, is written about in metaphorical terms even in the first line. The idea of a bed being a ‘spinning world’ is striking and starts the poem off at a giddying pace. Duffy neatly presents the bed as a microcosmic centre of an imaginative, expansive universe ‘of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas’ suggesting, at the very least, the plays As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet and The Tempest. As You Like It is set in the Forest of Arden, close to Stratford-upon-Avon; Macbeth and Hamlet are partly set in castles. Hamlet contemplates suicide on a clifftop and The Tempest involves a sea voyage. The image of Shakespeare diving in bed suggests oral sex with Anne Hathaway as well as reminding us that he was the man who wrote Ariel’s song in The Tempest.
It is significant that Anne Hathaway describes her husband as a ‘lover’ (line 3), suggesting that their physical relationship was vital and exciting. This is given further emphasis by the words ‘spinning’, ‘shooting’, ‘dancing’ and ‘laughing’. The vitality of their sexual union fits in well with the sort of people we might expect Anne and her husband to be.
Duffy begins with a quotation from Shakespeare’s will as an epigraph to the poem. Some commentators, and not only feminists, have taken the statement to be something of a slight on Anne Hathaway. To be left a ‘second best bed’ is not generally felt to have been complimentary. We might have expected, then, that Anne Hathaway would be given the opportunity to have her revenge. Although other poems in The World’s Wife do present women as being unhappy with their lot, Anne Hathaway’s version of events reveals that she was very much in love with her husband. Theirs was a marriage of equality. He left her his second best bed because it was the one in which they had enacted in a very real sense the drama of their relationship. No children are mentioned by Anne, she concentrates purely on the physical act and not its consequences.
In keeping with the expression of a separate identity, Anne Hathaway is presented as someone who is able to use words in an impressively poetic way. In this sense her personality rhymes with her husband’s. She refers to her body being a ‘softer rhyme’ to Shakespeare. Here, Duffy is subtly relating the poetic techniques of masculine rhyme and feminine rhyme to the actual lives of two people who could hardly be separated from art: ‘kisses’ at the end of line 4 is a feminine ending; ‘touch’ is a masculine one. This explicit use of linguistic and poetic terms draws attention to the self-conscious artifice of the persona’s utterance, as well as the poet’s.
Hathaway states that her lover’s words ‘echo’ as ‘assonance’ in her head. The words ‘on’, ‘body’, ‘softer’, ‘to’, ‘echo’, ‘assonance’, ‘touch’ and ‘noun’ are all linked by assonance; the ‘o’ sound does indeed echo through the lines as a softer rhyme. The description of Shakespeare’s touch as ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun’ creates a vital impression of joyous action. It is sexually suggestive in that his hands could be ‘dancing’ in the ‘centre’ of his wife. The line also alerts us to one of Shakespeare’s most famous means of energising language; he would often turn nouns into verbs. For example, in The Winter’s Tale Perdita says, ‘I’ll queen it no inch further.’ In a practically poetic sense, then, Shakespeare was able to find verbs in the centre of nouns. As is sometimes the case in Shakespeare’s sonnets, there is a perceptible progression in this sonnet with ‘Some nights’ (line 8), but the volta actually occurs after line 12 at the rhyming couplet, providing the clinching idea and sense of closure. This rhyme is, incidentally, masculine so we are aware of a female voice giving her husband something of a ghostly, lasting presence in its use. The metaphors in lines 8–9, ‘I dreamed he’d written me, the bed / a page beneath his writer’s hands’, are consistent with Shakespeare’s occupation but they also make a forceful statement about the imaginative power of his wife. She desires him so much that she would like to have been one of his dramatic creations. The bed as site of dramatic action is there as a blank for her husband’s imagination to be unleashed upon. Visually, sheets could easily be thought of as paper in this context. The blurring of the distinction between life and art is again inherent in this section of the poem. The subsequent ‘Romance / and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste’ is heavily erotic, concentrating on sensory exploration and not language itself. Lines 8–10 use theatrical imagery to powerful effect in presenting a scene of lovemaking. The word ‘drama’ makes reference to plays in general as well as to love, while ‘Romance’, one of the categories into which some of Shakespeare’s plays are placed, also reminds us that this relationship is not stale.
Anne relishes remembering that the ‘guests dozed on’ while she and William made love. The derogatory ‘dribbling their prose’ (line 12) is contrasted sharply with ‘My living laughing love’. The lilting alliteration and the cadence of the verse at this point convey extreme happiness and affection. This contrasts with the d, b and p, sounds in ‘dozed’, ‘dribbling’ and ‘prose’. The impression created is that the guests live an inferior life of prose. Shakespeare often gave low status characters prose to speak. The dash preceding the conclusion of the poem acts as something of a dramatic gesture and separates the descriptions of Shakespeare alive with Anne’s acknowledgement that he can only live on in her imagination now that he is dead. The fact that she describes her head as a ‘casket’, a strongbox for keeping jewels and other precious items, indicates the deep love and affection she had for her husband. The consonance on ‘hold’ and ‘held’ recalls that the lovers rhymed with each other when alive, while the tense-change poignantly signals the irrevocable change brought about by her husband’s death. The final, clinching rhyme of ‘head’ and ‘bed’ indicates that Anne Hathaway is able to keep love alive in her memory and imagination. We are left with Anne Hathaway cherishing the memory of being with her husband in ‘that next best bed’. Their true intimacy is made clear here as only she would have been able to interpret correctly Shakespeare’s intention when he wrote the famous bequest in his will. His will, in every sense, is hers.
This sonnet, then, is a poem about a poet by a poet, with the intermediary being the subject’s surviving partner. Carol Ann Duffy is using this thrown voice as a means of celebrating the subject, Shakespeare. Shakespeare delayed the volta in his sonnets until line twelve but there is often a discernible shift of ideas after the second quatrain, the point at which a Petrarchan sonnet displays a more noticeable turn.
Michael Woods writes about Havisham
This poem is a dramatic monologue and gives a powerful insight into the potential thoughts and feelings of the character in Charles Dickens’s novel, Great Expectations (1861). Miss Havisham was jilted at the altar and never recovered from the experience.
A mentally tortured Miss Havisham, riven by the conflict between being in love and hating the man who jilted her is encapsulated in the first two sentences: ‘Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then / I haven’t wished him dead.’ The plosive ‘b’ and dental ‘d’ sounds immediately establish the bitterness and violent aggression in the woman’s voice. The psychological damage done to Miss Havisham is presented in the physical image of eyes that have become ‘dark green pebbles’ and the tendons of her hands are ‘ropes’ she ‘could strangle with’.
The root of her hatred lies in the fact that she is a ‘Spinster’ (line 5). The word, as a sentence in its own right, is isolated like the woman who is defined by society in terms of her unmarried state. She is so obsessed with her predicament that she spends entire days ‘cawing Nooooo at the wall’. The sound suggested is, perhaps, that of a parrot endlessly repeating the same sound. It certainly conveys a visceral, animal-like howling too. Miss Havisham still wears her wedding dress, playing the role of bride, causing her to ‘stink and remember’. The sight of the yellowing dress is seen in a ‘slewed mirror’. What does this suggest? Seeing herself in the mirror rekindles her hatred of the man who deserted her, resulting in the ‘Puce curses’ of line 9.
She has dreams that are sexual fantasies about what she might have experienced with the husband she never had. Her ‘fluent tongue’ explores his body but as she moves near his loins: ‘I suddenly bite awake’. This suggests that in doing so she could emasculate him with her teeth, re-establishing the overriding emotion of anger that she still feels. The enjambment that links stanzas 3 and 4 draws attention to this conflict as it reminds us that such an opposition can co-exist in one person. In terms of the layout of the poem’s lines, the physical distance between the stanzas neatly presents the simultaneous tendency of Miss Havisham to love and hate the man. The mixture of emotions she articulates in line 1 is developed in the oxymoron ‘Love’s / hate behind a white veil’ (lines 12–13). This veil, like Havisham, has decayed; it has yellowed and she is physically and mentally diminished. The power of ‘red balloon / bursting in my face. Bang’. is conveyed again through the use of plosives. Also, through the use if the plosive onomatopoeic ‘Bang’ we see her faced with the truth of her situation erupting through the ‘veil’ of her dream as she becomes fully conscious. There may also be a subconscious reference to the rupturing of the hymen that she has never experienced. She remembers stabbing her wedding cake, which leads to a disturbing aexpression of both homicidal and necrophiliac tendencies.
A mentally tortured Miss Havisham, riven by the conflict between being in love and hating the man who jilted her is encapsulated in the first two sentences: ‘Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then / I haven’t wished him dead.’ The plosive ‘b’ and dental ‘d’ sounds immediately establish the bitterness and violent aggression in the woman’s voice. The psychological damage done to Miss Havisham is presented in the physical image of eyes that have become ‘dark green pebbles’ and the tendons of her hands are ‘ropes’ she ‘could strangle with’.
The root of her hatred lies in the fact that she is a ‘Spinster’ (line 5). The word, as a sentence in its own right, is isolated like the woman who is defined by society in terms of her unmarried state. She is so obsessed with her predicament that she spends entire days ‘cawing Nooooo at the wall’. The sound suggested is, perhaps, that of a parrot endlessly repeating the same sound. It certainly conveys a visceral, animal-like howling too. Miss Havisham still wears her wedding dress, playing the role of bride, causing her to ‘stink and remember’. The sight of the yellowing dress is seen in a ‘slewed mirror’. What does this suggest? Seeing herself in the mirror rekindles her hatred of the man who deserted her, resulting in the ‘Puce curses’ of line 9.
She has dreams that are sexual fantasies about what she might have experienced with the husband she never had. Her ‘fluent tongue’ explores his body but as she moves near his loins: ‘I suddenly bite awake’. This suggests that in doing so she could emasculate him with her teeth, re-establishing the overriding emotion of anger that she still feels. The enjambment that links stanzas 3 and 4 draws attention to this conflict as it reminds us that such an opposition can co-exist in one person. In terms of the layout of the poem’s lines, the physical distance between the stanzas neatly presents the simultaneous tendency of Miss Havisham to love and hate the man. The mixture of emotions she articulates in line 1 is developed in the oxymoron ‘Love’s / hate behind a white veil’ (lines 12–13). This veil, like Havisham, has decayed; it has yellowed and she is physically and mentally diminished. The power of ‘red balloon / bursting in my face. Bang’. is conveyed again through the use of plosives. Also, through the use if the plosive onomatopoeic ‘Bang’ we see her faced with the truth of her situation erupting through the ‘veil’ of her dream as she becomes fully conscious. There may also be a subconscious reference to the rupturing of the hymen that she has never experienced. She remembers stabbing her wedding cake, which leads to a disturbing aexpression of both homicidal and necrophiliac tendencies.
Michael Woods writes about Stealing
In this poem, a burglar and petty thief talks about the items he has stolen, the most unusual of which was a snowman. The poet gives us an insight into what he might be thinking.
Duffy lived for a while by Wimbledon Common in London. Her neighbours once built a traditional snowman for their children, which was stolen. The poet wondered who might have done such a thing. She concluded that it could only have happened under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, a period during which individualism and greed seemed to be regarded as virtues. It is clear, then, that apart from being curious about who might steal a snowman from children, Duffy regarded the actions of an individual as a barometer of the political climate. The opening of stanza 2, ‘Better off dead than giving in, not taking / what you want’ appears to encapsulate this idea.
This dramatic monologue is a good example of how formal organisation into stanzas of regular length can contain the informal register of a persona. Statements such as ‘He weighed a ton’ (line 7), ‘I’m a mucky ghost’ (line 13), ‘I nicked a bust of Shakespeare once’ (line 23) and ‘flogged it’ (line 24) convincingly recreate the argot of the man who is speaking.
He seems to derive pleasure (although this is short-lived) from gratuitous acts of burglary, enjoying the excitement or frisson of the act itself rather than really desiring the objects he steals. He leaves a ‘mess’ (line 13) in other people’s houses. This could refer to the chaos often left behind by burglars who empty drawers and so on, but it could equally suggest defecation, a common feature of burglary. Such an act is calculated to defile victims’ private places. A Freudian psychologist would suggest that its origins are sexual. There is certainly a suggestion of an auto-erotic charge in ‘I watch my gloved hand twisting the doorknob. / A stranger’s bedroom. Mirrors. I sigh like this – Aah’. He also derives pleasure from speculating upon the effect that his acts will have on others: ‘Part of the thrill was knowing / that children would cry in the morning’. (lines 8–9).
The utter futility of what the man does is made clear in such details as, ‘I joy-ride cars / to nowhere’. He steals a guitar but never learns to play it. Perhaps the most striking example of such futility is his attempted reassembling of the stolen snowman. His failure to recreate ‘a mate’ (line 3), with connotations of both friendship and physical intimacy, prompts him to immediate aggression and destruction, leaving him ‘amongst lumps of snow, sick of the world’ (line 19). This fragmentation could symbolically suggest a personality which is itself disintegrated, a Jungian term for describing someone who has not come to terms with his or her ‘shadow’.
Duffy’s use of internal rhyme is appropriate to the interior aspect of a dramatic monologue which seeks to explore the thief’s motives for acting in the way he does. For example ‘the slice of ice / within my own brain’ indicates a self-awareness and concern with interior workings, which the man identifies with coldness and hardness. The second stanza’s ‘chill’ and ‘thrill’ reinforce this identification. The snowman, itself a cherished object, is curiously as unfeeling as he is and conveniently ‘mute’ (stanza 1).
‘Stealing’ is another of Duffy’s explorations of the minds of those who are mentally unstable. Useful comparisons are ‘Psychopath’ (Selling Manhattan), ‘Liar’ (The Other Country) and ‘Havisham’ (Mean Time).
Duffy lived for a while by Wimbledon Common in London. Her neighbours once built a traditional snowman for their children, which was stolen. The poet wondered who might have done such a thing. She concluded that it could only have happened under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, a period during which individualism and greed seemed to be regarded as virtues. It is clear, then, that apart from being curious about who might steal a snowman from children, Duffy regarded the actions of an individual as a barometer of the political climate. The opening of stanza 2, ‘Better off dead than giving in, not taking / what you want’ appears to encapsulate this idea.
This dramatic monologue is a good example of how formal organisation into stanzas of regular length can contain the informal register of a persona. Statements such as ‘He weighed a ton’ (line 7), ‘I’m a mucky ghost’ (line 13), ‘I nicked a bust of Shakespeare once’ (line 23) and ‘flogged it’ (line 24) convincingly recreate the argot of the man who is speaking.
He seems to derive pleasure (although this is short-lived) from gratuitous acts of burglary, enjoying the excitement or frisson of the act itself rather than really desiring the objects he steals. He leaves a ‘mess’ (line 13) in other people’s houses. This could refer to the chaos often left behind by burglars who empty drawers and so on, but it could equally suggest defecation, a common feature of burglary. Such an act is calculated to defile victims’ private places. A Freudian psychologist would suggest that its origins are sexual. There is certainly a suggestion of an auto-erotic charge in ‘I watch my gloved hand twisting the doorknob. / A stranger’s bedroom. Mirrors. I sigh like this – Aah’. He also derives pleasure from speculating upon the effect that his acts will have on others: ‘Part of the thrill was knowing / that children would cry in the morning’. (lines 8–9).
The utter futility of what the man does is made clear in such details as, ‘I joy-ride cars / to nowhere’. He steals a guitar but never learns to play it. Perhaps the most striking example of such futility is his attempted reassembling of the stolen snowman. His failure to recreate ‘a mate’ (line 3), with connotations of both friendship and physical intimacy, prompts him to immediate aggression and destruction, leaving him ‘amongst lumps of snow, sick of the world’ (line 19). This fragmentation could symbolically suggest a personality which is itself disintegrated, a Jungian term for describing someone who has not come to terms with his or her ‘shadow’.
Duffy’s use of internal rhyme is appropriate to the interior aspect of a dramatic monologue which seeks to explore the thief’s motives for acting in the way he does. For example ‘the slice of ice / within my own brain’ indicates a self-awareness and concern with interior workings, which the man identifies with coldness and hardness. The second stanza’s ‘chill’ and ‘thrill’ reinforce this identification. The snowman, itself a cherished object, is curiously as unfeeling as he is and conveniently ‘mute’ (stanza 1).
‘Stealing’ is another of Duffy’s explorations of the minds of those who are mentally unstable. Useful comparisons are ‘Psychopath’ (Selling Manhattan), ‘Liar’ (The Other Country) and ‘Havisham’ (Mean Time).
Michael Woods writes about We Remember Your Childhood Well
This is a complex poem, not because of its diction but because of its ambiguous use of perspective, or point of view. In essence, the poem is about the responsibility we all have to children. Although we could read the poem as being about how adults can damage children, Duffy seems to be presenting the idea that regimes are capable of rewriting history in ways convenient to them. We are familiar, for example, with the way in which Joseph Stalin in Russia edited people from photographs and had official records tampered with. What Duffy is saying is that what is horrific and damaging on an individual level can become exponentially larger if horrible principles are applied on what can sometimes be a national scale. This does not mean that harm done to an individual is less significant if it happens to be an isolated instance or a mass one.
The voiceless child is helpless in the face of the authority figures of parents and any other adults who wield power. The truth is that the child is likely to be the most reliable ‘witness’ to the events in his or her own life. Also, adults cannot calculate the damage they do to children. It is clear that the implied listener or defender is the older self of the child. The point to be drawn out here is that damage is not just something that can be inflicted and forgotten about; it lasts. A scarred child becomes a scarred adult.
The poem opens with a denial, “Nobody hurt you” and this is sustained throughout the poem. The word nobody occurs six times and Duffy clearly wants the denial to ring hollow. The child’s version of the events denied in stanza one would clearly be that she was physically “hurt”, that her parents/ guardian/s “argued…all night” and that she was told that there was “a bad man on the moors”. Finally, she would say that they were locked in to their bedroom.
The language of the second stanza takes on the sinister sound of police in totalitarian or oppressive states using official language with a clipped, formal tone. This is doubly alarming, given that the ostensive subject of the poem is others’ memory of a child’s childhood. Children are naturally inquisitive and ask questions incessantly. The speaker/s (there first person plural lends a collective voice to the poem that potentially implicates all adults) claim that they were patient and answered the child’s questions. The fact that this seems to be challenged by the child (there is an implied rebuttal from the child all the way through the poem) is clear when the emphatic one word sentence “No.” is used by Duffy in line 4. This is a feature of some adults’ treatment of children. They think that their word can obliterate any alternatives. This is also true of certain types of government. Duffy is clearly engaging here with the way in which those in authority can sometimes abuse their positions by wielding power and making statements they know will not be challenged, probably because those listening are colluding with them. “That didn’t occur” (line 4) has the air of an official making a statement in court. The ‘child’ is crushed by being told “you couldn’t sing anyway”. The reference to Film Fun locates the poem in the nineteen forties during the Second World War. The final short sentence in stanza 3, “Anyone’s guess.” ironically draws attention to the fact that what the speaker/s are saying is a pack of lies and that the child (now grown up?) can do nothing to gainsay a majority view.
The next three stanzas present a denial of the effects of separation, presumably evacuation in the war. The opening of stanza three, “Nobody forced you.” (line 7) is sinister with overtones of police brutality. The child allegedly “Begged” to be sent away and there are photographs to prove it if her “smiling and waving” (line 9). It is also claimed that the child “chose the dress” in which she went away. This reads as almost a macabre bridal image of a girl in her ‘going away dress’. In saying to the ‘child’, “The whole thing is inside your head.” (line 9) has two meanings. One the one hand, they mean that it is an invention of the child’s imagination but on the other, Duffy is highlighting the fact that what happened to this child is indeed inside her head and will never be out of her head. Further, it will be her version of events that will remain lodged there.
Stanza four builds on the atmosphere of oppression created by Duffy earlier in the poem. The arrogantly condescending and confident, “What you recall are impressions; we have the facts” (line 10). The speaker/s control is compounded in their saying, “We called the tune” (line 10). This is no longer the case in the context of what the poem sets out do, which is clearly to expose the disreputable nature of what these people did. Indeed, they are so shameless that they tacitly admit their version of events is false. It was their power in being able to call the tune that allowed them to invent somebody’s past. The adults are described by Duffy as “The secret police of your childhood” in the most explicitly chilling image with political overtones in the whole pope. It throws the sentence “Nobody forced you” into sharp relief because it puts the reader in mind of torturing regimes. The bullying dimension of the adults’ behaviour is further emphasised through the admission that they were able to get way with what they did simply by dint of being “older and wiser” but, most worryingly, “bigger”. The recalled “sound of their voices” is a hideous “Boom.Boom.Boom.” This is the sound a small child might experience shouting of adults as, while it also suggests the beating a torture victim might have at the hands of aggressors. It even evokes the explosions of bombs or guns, something that is not out of place in a poem that has clear political as well as social concerns.
The transformation of an evacuation to “an extra holiday” is almost laughable were it not for the fact that the child was clearly scared and sent away with strangers who were, the speaker/s admit “firm”. In the context of the child’s experience as previously suggested in the poem, this is a gross understatement and, in our terms, could be synonymous with ‘sadistic’. The adults’ attempt to exonerate themselves by saying, “There was none to blame but yourself if it all ended in tears.” (line 15) is clearly a lie and turns a cliché into a sinister example of what seems ot amount to perjury in the court of life.
The question that opens the final stanza shows how utterly insensitive the speakers are to the effect they had on this child. The point is that what she experienced then still affects her now. The shocking, scatological image of “nobody left the skidmarks of sin / on your soul” (lines 16-17) suggest that the child (now an adult) feels contaminated and sullied by her early experience at the hands of these adults, just as undergarments can be by faecal remains. She feels, it seems, “wide open for Hell.” (line 17). The speakers’ view of their child’s past is incredible: “You were loved” becomes unbelievable and their claim, “We did what was best” could be transposed to “worst”. The final sentence rings particularly hollow as it repeats the title of the poem in a way that people do if they are not convinced of the truth of that they are saying themselves.
This poem emphasises the need for children to be protected and for societies to maintain a truthful and equitable regime based upon the freedom, not the repression of, the individual.
The voiceless child is helpless in the face of the authority figures of parents and any other adults who wield power. The truth is that the child is likely to be the most reliable ‘witness’ to the events in his or her own life. Also, adults cannot calculate the damage they do to children. It is clear that the implied listener or defender is the older self of the child. The point to be drawn out here is that damage is not just something that can be inflicted and forgotten about; it lasts. A scarred child becomes a scarred adult.
The poem opens with a denial, “Nobody hurt you” and this is sustained throughout the poem. The word nobody occurs six times and Duffy clearly wants the denial to ring hollow. The child’s version of the events denied in stanza one would clearly be that she was physically “hurt”, that her parents/ guardian/s “argued…all night” and that she was told that there was “a bad man on the moors”. Finally, she would say that they were locked in to their bedroom.
The language of the second stanza takes on the sinister sound of police in totalitarian or oppressive states using official language with a clipped, formal tone. This is doubly alarming, given that the ostensive subject of the poem is others’ memory of a child’s childhood. Children are naturally inquisitive and ask questions incessantly. The speaker/s (there first person plural lends a collective voice to the poem that potentially implicates all adults) claim that they were patient and answered the child’s questions. The fact that this seems to be challenged by the child (there is an implied rebuttal from the child all the way through the poem) is clear when the emphatic one word sentence “No.” is used by Duffy in line 4. This is a feature of some adults’ treatment of children. They think that their word can obliterate any alternatives. This is also true of certain types of government. Duffy is clearly engaging here with the way in which those in authority can sometimes abuse their positions by wielding power and making statements they know will not be challenged, probably because those listening are colluding with them. “That didn’t occur” (line 4) has the air of an official making a statement in court. The ‘child’ is crushed by being told “you couldn’t sing anyway”. The reference to Film Fun locates the poem in the nineteen forties during the Second World War. The final short sentence in stanza 3, “Anyone’s guess.” ironically draws attention to the fact that what the speaker/s are saying is a pack of lies and that the child (now grown up?) can do nothing to gainsay a majority view.
The next three stanzas present a denial of the effects of separation, presumably evacuation in the war. The opening of stanza three, “Nobody forced you.” (line 7) is sinister with overtones of police brutality. The child allegedly “Begged” to be sent away and there are photographs to prove it if her “smiling and waving” (line 9). It is also claimed that the child “chose the dress” in which she went away. This reads as almost a macabre bridal image of a girl in her ‘going away dress’. In saying to the ‘child’, “The whole thing is inside your head.” (line 9) has two meanings. One the one hand, they mean that it is an invention of the child’s imagination but on the other, Duffy is highlighting the fact that what happened to this child is indeed inside her head and will never be out of her head. Further, it will be her version of events that will remain lodged there.
Stanza four builds on the atmosphere of oppression created by Duffy earlier in the poem. The arrogantly condescending and confident, “What you recall are impressions; we have the facts” (line 10). The speaker/s control is compounded in their saying, “We called the tune” (line 10). This is no longer the case in the context of what the poem sets out do, which is clearly to expose the disreputable nature of what these people did. Indeed, they are so shameless that they tacitly admit their version of events is false. It was their power in being able to call the tune that allowed them to invent somebody’s past. The adults are described by Duffy as “The secret police of your childhood” in the most explicitly chilling image with political overtones in the whole pope. It throws the sentence “Nobody forced you” into sharp relief because it puts the reader in mind of torturing regimes. The bullying dimension of the adults’ behaviour is further emphasised through the admission that they were able to get way with what they did simply by dint of being “older and wiser” but, most worryingly, “bigger”. The recalled “sound of their voices” is a hideous “Boom.Boom.Boom.” This is the sound a small child might experience shouting of adults as, while it also suggests the beating a torture victim might have at the hands of aggressors. It even evokes the explosions of bombs or guns, something that is not out of place in a poem that has clear political as well as social concerns.
The transformation of an evacuation to “an extra holiday” is almost laughable were it not for the fact that the child was clearly scared and sent away with strangers who were, the speaker/s admit “firm”. In the context of the child’s experience as previously suggested in the poem, this is a gross understatement and, in our terms, could be synonymous with ‘sadistic’. The adults’ attempt to exonerate themselves by saying, “There was none to blame but yourself if it all ended in tears.” (line 15) is clearly a lie and turns a cliché into a sinister example of what seems ot amount to perjury in the court of life.
The question that opens the final stanza shows how utterly insensitive the speakers are to the effect they had on this child. The point is that what she experienced then still affects her now. The shocking, scatological image of “nobody left the skidmarks of sin / on your soul” (lines 16-17) suggest that the child (now an adult) feels contaminated and sullied by her early experience at the hands of these adults, just as undergarments can be by faecal remains. She feels, it seems, “wide open for Hell.” (line 17). The speakers’ view of their child’s past is incredible: “You were loved” becomes unbelievable and their claim, “We did what was best” could be transposed to “worst”. The final sentence rings particularly hollow as it repeats the title of the poem in a way that people do if they are not convinced of the truth of that they are saying themselves.
This poem emphasises the need for children to be protected and for societies to maintain a truthful and equitable regime based upon the freedom, not the repression of, the individual.
Michael Woods writes about We Remember Your Childhood Well
This is a complex poem, not because of its diction but because of its ambiguous use of perspective, or point of view. In essence, the poem is about the responsibility we all have to children. Although we could read the poem as being about how adults can damage children, Duffy seems to be presenting the idea that regimes are capable of rewriting history in ways convenient to them. We are familiar, for example, with the way in which Joseph Stalin in Russia edited people from photographs and had official records tampered with. What Duffy is saying is that what is horrific and damaging on an individual level can become exponentially larger if horrible principles are applied on what can sometimes be a national scale. This does not mean that harm done to an individual is less significant if it happens to be an isolated instance or a mass one.
The voiceless child is helpless in the face of the authority figures of parents and any other adults who wield power. The truth is that the child is likely to be the most reliable ‘witness’ to the events in his or her own life. Also, adults cannot calculate the damage they do to children. It is clear that the implied listener or defender is the older self of the child. The point to be drawn out here is that damage is not just something that can be inflicted and forgotten about; it lasts. A scarred child becomes a scarred adult.
The poem opens with a denial, “Nobody hurt you” and this is sustained throughout the poem. The word nobody occurs six times and Duffy clearly wants the denial to ring hollow. The child’s version of the events denied in stanza one would clearly be that she was physically “hurt”, that her parents/ guardian/s “argued…all night” and that she was told that there was “a bad man on the moors”. Finally, she would say that they were locked in to their bedroom.
The language of the second stanza takes on the sinister sound of police in totalitarian or oppressive states using official language with a clipped, formal tone. This is doubly alarming, given that the ostensive subject of the poem is others’ memory of a child’s childhood. Children are naturally inquisitive and ask questions incessantly. The speaker/s (there first person plural lends a collective voice to the poem that potentially implicates all adults) claim that they were patient and answered the child’s questions. The fact that this seems to be challenged by the child (there is an implied rebuttal from the child all the way through the poem) is clear when the emphatic one word sentence “No.” is used by Duffy in line 4. This is a feature of some adults’ treatment of children. They think that their word can obliterate any alternatives. This is also true of certain types of government. Duffy is clearly engaging here with the way in which those in authority can sometimes abuse their positions by wielding power and making statements they know will not be challenged, probably because those listening are colluding with them. “That didn’t occur” (line 4) has the air of an official making a statement in court. The ‘child’ is crushed by being told “you couldn’t sing anyway”. The reference to Film Fun locates the poem in the nineteen forties during the Second World War. The final short sentence in stanza 3, “Anyone’s guess.” ironically draws attention to the fact that what the speaker/s are saying is a pack of lies and that the child (now grown up?) can do nothing to gainsay a majority view.
The next three stanzas present a denial of the effects of separation, presumably evacuation in the war. The opening of stanza three, “Nobody forced you.” (line 7) is sinister with overtones of police brutality. The child allegedly “Begged” to be sent away and there are photographs to prove it if her “smiling and waving” (line 9). It is also claimed that the child “chose the dress” in which she went away. This reads as almost a macabre bridal image of a girl in her ‘going away dress’. In saying to the ‘child’, “The whole thing is inside your head.” (line 9) has two meanings. One the one hand, they mean that it is an invention of the child’s imagination but on the other, Duffy is highlighting the fact that what happened to this child is indeed inside her head and will never be out of her head. Further, it will be her version of events that will remain lodged there.
Stanza four builds on the atmosphere of oppression created by Duffy earlier in the poem. The arrogantly condescending and confident, “What you recall are impressions; we have the facts” (line 10). The speaker/s control is compounded in their saying, “We called the tune” (line 10). This is no longer the case in the context of what the poem sets out do, which is clearly to expose the disreputable nature of what these people did. Indeed, they are so shameless that they tacitly admit their version of events is false. It was their power in being able to call the tune that allowed them to invent somebody’s past. The adults are described by Duffy as “The secret police of your childhood” in the most explicitly chilling image with political overtones in the whole pope. It throws the sentence “Nobody forced you” into sharp relief because it puts the reader in mind of torturing regimes. The bullying dimension of the adults’ behaviour is further emphasised through the admission that they were able to get way with what they did simply by dint of being “older and wiser” but, most worryingly, “bigger”. The recalled “sound of their voices” is a hideous “Boom.Boom.Boom.” This is the sound a small child might experience shouting of adults as, while it also suggests the beating a torture victim might have at the hands of aggressors. It even evokes the explosions of bombs or guns, something that is not out of place in a poem that has clear political as well as social concerns.
The transformation of an evacuation to “an extra holiday” is almost laughable were it not for the fact that the child was clearly scared and sent away with strangers who were, the speaker/s admit “firm”. In the context of the child’s experience as previously suggested in the poem, this is a gross understatement and, in our terms, could be synonymous with ‘sadistic’. The adults’ attempt to exonerate themselves by saying, “There was none to blame but yourself if it all ended in tears.” (line 15) is clearly a lie and turns a cliché into a sinister example of what seems ot amount to perjury in the court of life.
The question that opens the final stanza shows how utterly insensitive the speakers are to the effect they had on this child. The point is that what she experienced then still affects her now. The shocking, scatological image of “nobody left the skidmarks of sin / on your soul” (lines 16-17) suggest that the child (now an adult) feels contaminated and sullied by her early experience at the hands of these adults, just as undergarments can be by faecal remains. She feels, it seems, “wide open for Hell.” (line 17). The speakers’ view of their child’s past is incredible: “You were loved” becomes unbelievable and their claim, “We did what was best” could be transposed to “worst”. The final sentence rings particularly hollow as it repeats the title of the poem in a way that people do if they are not convinced of the truth of that they are saying themselves.
This poem emphasises the need for children to be protected and for societies to maintain a truthful and equitable regime based upon the freedom, not the repression of, the individual.
The voiceless child is helpless in the face of the authority figures of parents and any other adults who wield power. The truth is that the child is likely to be the most reliable ‘witness’ to the events in his or her own life. Also, adults cannot calculate the damage they do to children. It is clear that the implied listener or defender is the older self of the child. The point to be drawn out here is that damage is not just something that can be inflicted and forgotten about; it lasts. A scarred child becomes a scarred adult.
The poem opens with a denial, “Nobody hurt you” and this is sustained throughout the poem. The word nobody occurs six times and Duffy clearly wants the denial to ring hollow. The child’s version of the events denied in stanza one would clearly be that she was physically “hurt”, that her parents/ guardian/s “argued…all night” and that she was told that there was “a bad man on the moors”. Finally, she would say that they were locked in to their bedroom.
The language of the second stanza takes on the sinister sound of police in totalitarian or oppressive states using official language with a clipped, formal tone. This is doubly alarming, given that the ostensive subject of the poem is others’ memory of a child’s childhood. Children are naturally inquisitive and ask questions incessantly. The speaker/s (there first person plural lends a collective voice to the poem that potentially implicates all adults) claim that they were patient and answered the child’s questions. The fact that this seems to be challenged by the child (there is an implied rebuttal from the child all the way through the poem) is clear when the emphatic one word sentence “No.” is used by Duffy in line 4. This is a feature of some adults’ treatment of children. They think that their word can obliterate any alternatives. This is also true of certain types of government. Duffy is clearly engaging here with the way in which those in authority can sometimes abuse their positions by wielding power and making statements they know will not be challenged, probably because those listening are colluding with them. “That didn’t occur” (line 4) has the air of an official making a statement in court. The ‘child’ is crushed by being told “you couldn’t sing anyway”. The reference to Film Fun locates the poem in the nineteen forties during the Second World War. The final short sentence in stanza 3, “Anyone’s guess.” ironically draws attention to the fact that what the speaker/s are saying is a pack of lies and that the child (now grown up?) can do nothing to gainsay a majority view.
The next three stanzas present a denial of the effects of separation, presumably evacuation in the war. The opening of stanza three, “Nobody forced you.” (line 7) is sinister with overtones of police brutality. The child allegedly “Begged” to be sent away and there are photographs to prove it if her “smiling and waving” (line 9). It is also claimed that the child “chose the dress” in which she went away. This reads as almost a macabre bridal image of a girl in her ‘going away dress’. In saying to the ‘child’, “The whole thing is inside your head.” (line 9) has two meanings. One the one hand, they mean that it is an invention of the child’s imagination but on the other, Duffy is highlighting the fact that what happened to this child is indeed inside her head and will never be out of her head. Further, it will be her version of events that will remain lodged there.
Stanza four builds on the atmosphere of oppression created by Duffy earlier in the poem. The arrogantly condescending and confident, “What you recall are impressions; we have the facts” (line 10). The speaker/s control is compounded in their saying, “We called the tune” (line 10). This is no longer the case in the context of what the poem sets out do, which is clearly to expose the disreputable nature of what these people did. Indeed, they are so shameless that they tacitly admit their version of events is false. It was their power in being able to call the tune that allowed them to invent somebody’s past. The adults are described by Duffy as “The secret police of your childhood” in the most explicitly chilling image with political overtones in the whole pope. It throws the sentence “Nobody forced you” into sharp relief because it puts the reader in mind of torturing regimes. The bullying dimension of the adults’ behaviour is further emphasised through the admission that they were able to get way with what they did simply by dint of being “older and wiser” but, most worryingly, “bigger”. The recalled “sound of their voices” is a hideous “Boom.Boom.Boom.” This is the sound a small child might experience shouting of adults as, while it also suggests the beating a torture victim might have at the hands of aggressors. It even evokes the explosions of bombs or guns, something that is not out of place in a poem that has clear political as well as social concerns.
The transformation of an evacuation to “an extra holiday” is almost laughable were it not for the fact that the child was clearly scared and sent away with strangers who were, the speaker/s admit “firm”. In the context of the child’s experience as previously suggested in the poem, this is a gross understatement and, in our terms, could be synonymous with ‘sadistic’. The adults’ attempt to exonerate themselves by saying, “There was none to blame but yourself if it all ended in tears.” (line 15) is clearly a lie and turns a cliché into a sinister example of what seems ot amount to perjury in the court of life.
The question that opens the final stanza shows how utterly insensitive the speakers are to the effect they had on this child. The point is that what she experienced then still affects her now. The shocking, scatological image of “nobody left the skidmarks of sin / on your soul” (lines 16-17) suggest that the child (now an adult) feels contaminated and sullied by her early experience at the hands of these adults, just as undergarments can be by faecal remains. She feels, it seems, “wide open for Hell.” (line 17). The speakers’ view of their child’s past is incredible: “You were loved” becomes unbelievable and their claim, “We did what was best” could be transposed to “worst”. The final sentence rings particularly hollow as it repeats the title of the poem in a way that people do if they are not convinced of the truth of that they are saying themselves.
This poem emphasises the need for children to be protected and for societies to maintain a truthful and equitable regime based upon the freedom, not the repression of, the individual.
Tuesday, 2 December 2008
Some Thoughts on Stealing - Carol Ann Duffy
Stealing
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Poetry Model Answer
In “My Last Duchess” Robert Browning’s Duke seems to have been jealous of his former wife. Compare Browning’s treatment of this idea with the same theme in one other pre-1914 poem and two poems by Carol Ann Duffy or Simon Armitage.
“My Last Duchess” opens with the speaker, the Duke, inviting his visitor to admire a painting of his ex-wife: “I call
That piece a wonder”
He seems to treasure
“The depth and passion of its earnest glance”
and we might expect in this early part of the poem that the painting helps him to recall the serious love of his (dead?) wife fondly.
The painting is so important to him that he rarely allows other people to view it – it is hidden by a curtain, and he is the only person permitted to reveal the painting. By now we may start to feel alarmed: why does he want to hide his ex-wife from view?
Gradually the reason emerges: he was, and still is, jealous of her, because her joy came not just from her husband’s company. She was “too easily impressed”, and “her looks went everywhere.” Her fault, in his eyes, was that she considered pleasing him no more important than enjoying the sunset, eating cherries or riding her horse.
She failed to give him the attention he craved, and worse still, she took no account of his breeding, his nine hundred years old family name. Yet he could not tell her of his displeasure because that would mean stooping to her level, “and I choose
never to stoop.”
His jealousy at her constant smiling grew and grew, until the sinister conclusion:
“I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.”
The Duke dismisses her fate, presumed dead, coldly, abruptly, as he admires instead a bronze statue which he has been able to bend to his will.
In “The Song of the Old Mother”, in contrast, we feel not horror but sympathy. Her envy is directed at the young. Her lament is brief, despairing, almost monosyllabic, which gives the poem a tone of slow, sad resignation.
She describes in simple language her chores: rising early, lighting the fire, cleaning, cooking. Her life holds no pleasures, unlike those of the young, whose only thoughts are of trivial matters:
“the matching of ribbons for bosom and head”
The poem ends in a bitter couplet which points up her passive resignation, with the powerful rhyming of “old” and “cold” to emphasise the burden of age and “the seed of the fire” of her life dying feebly away.
The protagonist of “Education for Leisure” seems younger, filled with envy of the whole world. He (his simple speech, the emphasis on “I”, and the tendency to violence sound more male than female) expresses his frustration at the outset:
“Today I am going to kill something. Anything.”
Because he is constantly ignored, he, like the Duke, is determined to take control, to play God with other creatures’ lives. His aggression increases in scale, from crushing a fly to flushing away a goldfish. At first his threats have a humorous edge, when the cat and the budgie try to escape him.
However, his self-delusion is growing rapidly. He believes he is a genius, and is desperate to be noticed by “them” as one:
“I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.”
When the people at the job centre and the radio presenter spurn his autograph and his “superstar” status, something snaps inside him.
The poem ends in four sudden, short sentences laden with danger:
“The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.”
The violent assault comes earlier in “Hitcher”, enabling the reader to feel the weight of the speaker’s callous indifference to the life he has ended. Bored by his job, and jealous of his hitch-hiker’s untroubled attitude to life,
“following the sun to west from east”
he attacks him, repeatedly, gratuitously, and ejects him from the moving car.
The speaker is proud of the skill with which he dispatched his victim – “didn’t even swerve” – rather than showing any remorse. On the contrary, having watched him
“bouncing off the kerb”
he concludes with a vengeful, harsh farewell, completely out of touch with reality, just like the killer in “Education for Leisure”:
“Stitch that, I remember thinking,
you can walk from there.”
In both poems, as in “My Last Duchess”, we find little to like or sympathise with in the central figure because he reveals no emotions other than naked envy or jealousy.
“My Last Duchess” opens with the speaker, the Duke, inviting his visitor to admire a painting of his ex-wife: “I call
That piece a wonder”
He seems to treasure
“The depth and passion of its earnest glance”
and we might expect in this early part of the poem that the painting helps him to recall the serious love of his (dead?) wife fondly.
The painting is so important to him that he rarely allows other people to view it – it is hidden by a curtain, and he is the only person permitted to reveal the painting. By now we may start to feel alarmed: why does he want to hide his ex-wife from view?
Gradually the reason emerges: he was, and still is, jealous of her, because her joy came not just from her husband’s company. She was “too easily impressed”, and “her looks went everywhere.” Her fault, in his eyes, was that she considered pleasing him no more important than enjoying the sunset, eating cherries or riding her horse.
She failed to give him the attention he craved, and worse still, she took no account of his breeding, his nine hundred years old family name. Yet he could not tell her of his displeasure because that would mean stooping to her level, “and I choose
never to stoop.”
His jealousy at her constant smiling grew and grew, until the sinister conclusion:
“I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.”
The Duke dismisses her fate, presumed dead, coldly, abruptly, as he admires instead a bronze statue which he has been able to bend to his will.
In “The Song of the Old Mother”, in contrast, we feel not horror but sympathy. Her envy is directed at the young. Her lament is brief, despairing, almost monosyllabic, which gives the poem a tone of slow, sad resignation.
She describes in simple language her chores: rising early, lighting the fire, cleaning, cooking. Her life holds no pleasures, unlike those of the young, whose only thoughts are of trivial matters:
“the matching of ribbons for bosom and head”
The poem ends in a bitter couplet which points up her passive resignation, with the powerful rhyming of “old” and “cold” to emphasise the burden of age and “the seed of the fire” of her life dying feebly away.
The protagonist of “Education for Leisure” seems younger, filled with envy of the whole world. He (his simple speech, the emphasis on “I”, and the tendency to violence sound more male than female) expresses his frustration at the outset:
“Today I am going to kill something. Anything.”
Because he is constantly ignored, he, like the Duke, is determined to take control, to play God with other creatures’ lives. His aggression increases in scale, from crushing a fly to flushing away a goldfish. At first his threats have a humorous edge, when the cat and the budgie try to escape him.
However, his self-delusion is growing rapidly. He believes he is a genius, and is desperate to be noticed by “them” as one:
“I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.”
When the people at the job centre and the radio presenter spurn his autograph and his “superstar” status, something snaps inside him.
The poem ends in four sudden, short sentences laden with danger:
“The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.”
The violent assault comes earlier in “Hitcher”, enabling the reader to feel the weight of the speaker’s callous indifference to the life he has ended. Bored by his job, and jealous of his hitch-hiker’s untroubled attitude to life,
“following the sun to west from east”
he attacks him, repeatedly, gratuitously, and ejects him from the moving car.
The speaker is proud of the skill with which he dispatched his victim – “didn’t even swerve” – rather than showing any remorse. On the contrary, having watched him
“bouncing off the kerb”
he concludes with a vengeful, harsh farewell, completely out of touch with reality, just like the killer in “Education for Leisure”:
“Stitch that, I remember thinking,
you can walk from there.”
In both poems, as in “My Last Duchess”, we find little to like or sympathise with in the central figure because he reveals no emotions other than naked envy or jealousy.
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