Rapture

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The final poem in the collection takes lines from Robert Browning as its epigraph: "That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, / Lest you should think he never could recapture / That first fine careless rapture!" The quotation gives Duffy both the title of her collection and the title for this poem - "Over". The affair may be "over", but in her verse she can sing it "over" and the effect is uplifting and thrilling. Since the early 1980’s, Duffy has also worked as a playwright, having had her plays Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986), Loss (1986), and Casanova (2007) published and performed in various theatres. Secondly, it could be a reference to how the rings of a tree can tell its age, suggesting that the rings of their finger shows the years of their relationship within them. Aside from this, in the second, Duffy also uses much positive, yet physical imagery to describe the traits of her lover. The metaphor‘blessed in your flesh, blood, and hair, as though they were lovely garments’ seems to show her gratefulness for the closeness the two experienced, to the point as though they were connected as one being. Also, the very presence of her lover seemed to ‘pleasure the air’, which also seems to lift the melancholy air the poem holds. All this physical imagery could be linked to how Duffy feels they have such a close connection in their relationship. 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. There's some weaker poems. Tea is is kind of banal despite being on a subject that deeply appeals to me.

For anyone who was a teenager in the nineties or later, though, she was already well-known. Her poems are a constant on British school exam syllabuses, although one, ‘Education for Leisure’, was infamously removed by an exam board in 2008. (Duffy responded in verse, penning ‘Mrs Schofield's GCSE', named after an external examiner who complained about the poem, on the importance of poetry.) I would love to know who she is so I could fall in love with her. Swim in oceanic waves of desire. Actually, I know her name and I am in love with her: Poetry.

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.

These poems are almost old-fashioned in their commitment to rhyme, assonance and metre. In several poems there is a fairytale vocabulary, and ballad forms appear in "Betrothal" and in "Give": Duffy rose to greater prominence in UK poetry circles after her poem "Whoever She Was" won the Poetry Society National Poetry Competition in 1983. [31]

Carol Ann Duffy's poetry collections in order

The main themes of Rapture are love, loss, loneliness, gender issues, and death. [ citation needed] Reception [ edit ] 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. The effortless virtuosity, directness, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet. Rapture, her seventh collection, is a book-length love-poem, and a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is that Duffy refuses to simplify the contradictions of love, and read its transformations - infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and grief - as simply redemptive or destructive. An Unseen’, published in Duffy’s Laureate Poems collection Ritual Lighting, was commissioned as a poetic reaction to Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Send-Off’. But it also strikes a chord with readers of Rapture, envisioning “all future / past” as the speaker asks, “Has forever been then?” and is told, “Yes, / forever has been.” It seems only right that the real answer to ‘now what?’ comes to us not from the living but from the dead. In ‘Snow’ (from her 2011 collection The Bees), the icy flakes scattered by the ghosts that walk beside us offer space and silence, and the possibility of healing and redirection. The dead also offer a different question: “Cold, inconvenienced, late, what will you do now / with the gift of your left life?” Harrison, David (23 April 2011). "Royal wedding: Poet laureate writes verse for big day". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 12 January 2022 . Retrieved 30 April 2011.