Rapture

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CAROL: Well, I don’t think . . . that it’s important that everyone writes. I think it’s important that everyone reads from a young age and then some of those readers will want to become writers. I think that it’s an enriching and civilising and very human part of life to be able to sing, to be able to paint, to play an instrument, to have a go at writing a poem, to read, to go to the theatre, and we’re very much in danger of those things in education withering on the vine or not being properly invested in. I’m not kind of saying that everyone has to write and be a poet, but I am saying that everyone should read poetry and hear poetry and have it as part of lives and some of those will want to grow up and be writers. After 350 years of male dominance, the new royal poet is a Glaswegian lesbian […] Ten years ago she was passed over, but now her time has come.

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Before we proceed any further with an analysis of ‘The Love Poem’, here are the sources for the poems which Duffy quotes from. The first quotation, ‘my mistress’ eyes’, is from William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, which begins ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’; ‘let me count the ways’ is from another love poem, Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (‘ How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’); ‘come live with me’ appears in a number of Renaissance love poems, including Christopher Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ and ‘The Bait’ by John Donne. MILLY: So like, the idea of subverting things and, like, looking at something that has already been written.Carol Ann Duffy, one of the most significant names in contemporary British poetry, has achieved that rare feat of both critical and commercial success. Her work is read and enjoyed equally by critics, academics and lay readers, and it features regularly on both university syllabuses and school syllabuses. Some critics have accused Duffy of being too populist, but on the whole her work is highly acclaimed for being both literary and accessible, and she is regarded as one of Britain’s most well-loved and successful contemporary poets. CAROL: So, it was a story I was very familiar with and I was playing around with retelling to see if I could do something fresh with it— The word “Rapture” originally referred to the state of being, at the time of death, when a soul reached heaven and eternity in the presence of God. This ultimately came to mean extreme pleasure, earthly as well as religious. This is the third poem in Duffy’s collection entltled Rapture. Of the fifty-two poems eighteen are sonnets. The sonnet template is favoured by poets for serious subjects, including love. Duffy traces the progress of a love affair, with all its fluctuations, joys and heartache.

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As we celebrate Carol Ann Duffy’s decade as Poet Laureate, Dr Mari Hughes-Edwards offers a response to the themes of love and loss in her work What Will You Do Now with the Gift of Your Life? by Stephen Raw. RORY: It seems to me that in your career, you’ve done everything that you could ever hope to do with poetry. I mean you’ve taught it at degree level, you’ve published collections, what would you say would be the highlight of your career so far? Duffy is a very brave poet. Only pop songs are braver in their use of repetition, and in "Finding the Words" she succeeds in making an ordinary "I love you" into something extraordinary. Only gameshow hosts are braver in their use of puns, and in "Fall" she rushes headlong through at least five meanings of the word, to end with another pun in "your passionate gravity". CAROL: You write with your five senses, you write with your memory, your points of view, your language, and all that comes to bear on the poems one writes, but I wouldn’t think I’ve ever written a poem for a reason beyond writing a poem, so I don’t think of myself at all as an activist although, um, I’m in favour of activism but I think it’s a different talent. RORY: So the consequences are very much a secondary part then of what you want to write? You write something, you’re like ‘okay, this expresses what I believe, I’m going to put this out into the world,’ what the consequences are of that, what people interpret that as, that’s not what I’m thinking of, it's more about what I want to write, rather than what effect it could have.

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This is Duffy at her most serious - the poems are rich, beautiful and heart-rending in their exploration of the deepest recesses of human emotion, both joy and pain. These works are also her most formal - following in the tradition of Shakespeare and John Donne, Duffy’s contemporary love poems in this collection draw on the traditional sonnet and ballad forms. There is a tradition for the sequence of love poems. It runs from Shakespeare's sonnets or John Donne's poems, through to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese and Adrienne Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems. For the most part, the tale is sad. Only EBB actually got to marry her man . . . and maybe that happy ending was a bit sad too. Duffy’s themes include language and the representation of reality; the construction of the self; gender issues; contemporary culture; and many different forms of alienation, oppression and social inequality. She writes in everyday, conversational language, making her poems appear deceptively simple. With this demotic style she creates contemporary versions of traditional poetic forms - she makes frequent use of the dramatic monologue in her exploration of different voices and different identities, and she also uses the sonnet form. Duffy is both serious and humorous, often writing in a mischievous, playful style - in particular, she plays with words as she explores the way in which meaning and reality are constructed through language. In this, her work has been linked to postmodernism and poststructuralism, but this is a thematic influence rather than a stylistic one: consequently, there is an interesting contrast between the postmodern content and the conservative forms. We publish a Literature Newsletter when we have news and features on UK and international literature, plus opportunities for the industry to share.

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RORY: What kind of terms do you think in then? What’s the most important thing when you’re writing?

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CAROL: So, you’re thinking in terms of legacy, but I don’t think in those terms, so, I would have to say the idea of legacy has occurred to me.

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What is Duffy trying to say? One way to interpret ‘The Love Poem’ and its use of previous poets’ words is to say that the affair being described in the poem – and in the whole of Rapture – is over (as the final poem in the volume, simply called ‘Over’, will make clear). Duffy’s reference to ‘an epitaph’ in ‘The Love Poem’ hints at this: she is trying to memorialise or enshrine her love affair in words that will last, like those of the poets she quotes. (The opening words of the poem, ‘Till love exhausts itself’, also hints at the end of the affair.) Poet, playwright and freelance writer Carol Ann Duffy was born on 23 December 1955 in Glasgow and read philosophy at Liverpool University. CAROL: was retell the story from Ovid's metamorphoses of Midas and I decided to do that from the point of view of Mrs Midas— verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ CAROL: And it’s in a different context rather than the private world of the writer. What goes on in the poetry reading is a different thing. The voice is that of a first person speaker, we can assume the poet, using the pronoun “I”, and referring to “we” of the relationship. Born in 1955 in Glasgow, Duffy was brought up in Staffordshire. As a student in Liverpool she wrote poems and plays, became involved with "the scene" and Adrian Henry. With the collection Standing Female Nude (1985) she established her name. Three other important collections followed: Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990) and Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread poetry award and the Forward prize. For someone who has made a comparatively quiet career, away from the public eye and the literary celebrity round, she has a loyal following and a high profile. When the appointment of a new poet laureate was last in the news, it was she who commanded the popular vote. She was made a CBE in 2001. POEM ANALYSIS FROM RAPTURE COLLECTION (Carol Ann Duffy) - Document in A Level and IB English Literature RORY: Um, yeah, so you’re, y’know, you’ve been writing poetry for decades at this point. Were there any initial role models or kind of mentors that you had, especially at an early age, that either got you into poetry or helped inspire some of your poems, um, something along those lines?