Essays on Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “In Mrs Tilscher’s Class” expresses the poetic speaker’s love for literature in the context of an intriguing personal narrative. Such a passion came from her primary school teacher as Duffy’s protagonist grows into adulthood — from a dramatised experience in her...

Carol Ann Duffy wrote ‘The World’s Wife’ in order to scrutinize the representation of both men and women, inspired by her strong feminist views — reconstructing, for example, many of the ‘voiceless women’ from throughout history. As Duffy expressed it; ‘like sand and the oyster...

Within Remains, Simon Armitage, who is widely known for focusing on physiological health and for creating a documentary of young soldier in the height of the conflict occurring in Afghanistan, presents the theme of suffering through the personal view of a young, regimented soldier, by...

A poem which deals with the subject of love through strong human emotion is ‘Valentine’ written by Carol-Ann Duffy. The poets attitude to love is unusual as she provides a different perspective on how we can look at it by describing the unconventional and pessimstic...

Most of us have a clear perception of what fairy tales are, or what we assume them to be. Over the past century, these tales have been burdened with so many clich’s, such as evil queens’ curses and damsels-in-distress, that we tend to identify them...

Duffy’s poems, Adultery and Disgrace, portray the theme of betrayal in a number of different ways. Both show that betrayal is destructive and deadly to relationships, however, different diverse, including sibilance and oxymorons, are used across the two poems to portray this. It is possible...

In both “Before You Were Mine” and “Brothers,” Carol Ann Duffy uses descriptions of memory as a means of re-living past family life. Throughout “Before You Were Mine,” Duffy writes about her mother, and imagines her life before motherhood. This poem is designed as Duffy’s...

“Salome” is a poem taken from Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of poems The World’s Wife; most of the poems share a common feature: a historically marginalized narrator retelling the story from personal perspective. Salome’s character originally appeared in the New Testament and over the centuries...

Duffy explores ideas, thoughts and feelings about love in Valentine and Havisham by commenting on societal expectations of the outcomes and portraying love as unstable, dangerous and likely to cause hurt. Firstly, Duffy explores the expectation of marriage following a relationship in both poems, ‘the...

‘Mrs Midas’ is a revisionist version of the King Midas story told from the female perspective: traditionally, this ancient Greek myth was about a man who could turn everything to gold with a touch. This poem explores the sadness Mrs Midas feels in regards to...

The poet Carol Anne Duffy presents two different attitudes towards religion in her poems “Prayer” and “Confession.” In “Prayer,” Duffy contemplates how, in the absence of organised religion, comfort can instead be found in ordinary, prosaic occurrences. These usually insignificant experiences instead become a source...

Carol Ann Duffy’s love poems are often riddled with oxymoronic statements, which affirm the changing nature of love and how it is perceived in different relationships and in different periods of time and life. “Valentine” and “Havisham” are two poems which share similar proposals of...

Humans inflict suffering on other humans and when events are forgotten, they are repeated. In the poem “Shooting Stars,” Carol Ann Duffy tells a shocking story of a female prisoner held by Nazis in a concentration camp around the time of the Holocaust. This is...

Queen Herod is taken from Duffy’s The World’s Wife, a collection which inverts gender roles to celebrate female characters and display the injustice of men’s generalizations. This poem inverts the gender roles in the biblical story of the arrival of the Magi for Jesus’s birth...

I am going to compare three different poems: “My Box” by Gillian Clarke, “Valentine” by Carol Ann Duffy and “Shall I compare Thee…?” (Sonnet 18) by William Shakespeare. In my essay I will discuss the language, images, style, rhythm and many other aspects used to...

I am going to talk about two different kinds of love: mature love and religious love. I will compare Love (III) by George Hilbert (religious) and Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy (mature) and show the contrasts and trends in both. These two poems have distinct...

In both Before You Were Mine and Pluto, Duffy uses characters to present different viewpoints of the past and present. In Before You Were Mine, the past is seen to be tangible and physical as the character of the narrator’s mother is heavily described, whereas...

Duffy presents gender in the poems Litany and Havisham through society’s views and expectations of women, and the effects it has on them show how being female was harmful to their wellbeing. Litany creates an example of the ideal, successful woman. The reference to the...

The title of the poem Valentine written by Carol Ann Duffy is very misleading. One would expect to read romantic love, instead she writes about cynical love. She has obviously been hurt in previous relationships. The poem starts off with a positive statement-Not a red...