Rapture

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Now, the “love poems” of the past have been replaced by the “modern love poems”, which hardly have any love feeling like the earlier poems of the great poets used to have. I would suggest that the tone is such that the narrator clearly doesn’t feel that this is a positive thing. And ‘behold, thou art fair’ is from the Song of Solomon in the Bible, while ‘the desire of the moth for the star’ is a phrase in Percy Shelley’s poem ‘One Word is Too Often Profaned’. In the third line, Duffy uses Scottish colloquialism in the form of the word “skelf” this word describes a splinter and she is using it here to suggest that there isn’t even a hint of light. Rapture is a map of real love, in all its churning complexity; simultaneously direct and subtle, with poems that will find deep resonance in the experience of most readers, it is a collection that can and does speak for us all.

Carol Ann Duffy – Rapture | Genius

The Monkey’ sees the speaker, despite her new baby-pet’s energy, sitting alone at the end of a day, “toys tidied, all safe, house hushed”.

Finally appointed Poet Laureate in 2009, she was the first female and the first Scottish Poet Laureate in the role’s 400 year history.

Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy - Poem Analysis

Similar to the first stanza, this section also starts with the subordinate clause “Till love gives in and speaks”, which also shows the frustration of the poet towards the incapability of writing love poems by modern love poets, and makes us believe that the importance of “love” through these poems conveyed in the past, has faded away, or come to an end. 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? This is an elemental love - it could belong to any time were it not for the occasional contemporary accessories: a little black dress (metaphorical) and a mobile phone (actual). I very much enjoyed doing it and each time I wrote a poem, I’d be dealing with that and then it seemed that it would become a collection, but over maybe two or three years.

In 2012, to mark the Diamond Jubilee, she compiled Jubilee Lines, 60 poems from 60 poets each covering one year of the Queen's reign. In the words of poet Mary Oliver, writing in Our World about an earlier relationship that had impacted upon the love of her own life, Molly Malone Cook: “She had… an affair that struck deeply, I believe she loved totally and was loved totally… I am glad. Additionally, there is a line like “there is a garden in her face” which the poet has drawn from the poem with the same title by Thomas Campion. Rhyme, in our supremely mongrel uninflected language, which draws its vowel sounds from so many different sources, is one of the most significant ways in which words as well as people partner each other to create relationships that are more than the sum of their parts.