Rapture

Product Information

Duffy then describes how beautiful the fingers are in their ‘little rings’, which could be a reference to a couple of things. The animate and inanimate elements of the planet mirror and respond to the poet’s inner world and experience, feeling strikingly rational. When the appointment of a new poet laureate was last in the news, it was she who commanded the popular vote. The poem contains imagery relating to nature and materialism and covers the themes of time and romantic love. We believe that literature builds community—and if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support!

This is a nice contrast as up until this point the poem has consisted of dramatic images and this line kind of brings the tone back down to earth. The end of the line is enjambment and this helps the pace of the poem, although it is an enjambment line it does not dismiss the rhyming pattern. Carol Ann Duffy is also an acclaimed playwright, and has had plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London.When her first major poetry collections, Standing Female Nude (1985) and Selling Manhattan (1987), were published, Duffy was immediately acclaimed for her outstanding skill in characterisation, timing and dialogue, particularly in her use of the dramatic monologue. Though Duffy’s status and reputation rest predominantly on her poetry, she has also written various plays, and there is a lot of overlap between her poetic and dramatic skills. This is quite skilfully done as the narrator uses the word assonance to prove their point but also uses assonance in the line.

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. The twentieth Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, whose ten years in post ended in May 2019, knows what it is like to fall in love.

They assume that their subject is thinking of them and as a consequence, they think about them right back. Her work also shows the influence of Philip Larkin (nostalgia and dry humour), Dylan Thomas (elements of surrealism), the Beat poets and the Liverpool poets. The effortless virtuosity, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired contemporary poet. Her use of demotic, everyday language can be traced back to Wordsworth, while her interest in the dramatic monologue links her to Browning and Eliot.

This is a very dramatic way of describing the euphoric up-and-down feeling that a person gets when they are in love. Rapture‘ has a religious significance – it is supposed to be the time when the living and the dead ascend into heaven to spend eternity with God. All this physical imagery could be linked to how Duffy feels they have such a close connection in their relationship. Often Duffy breaks a central line, so it looks as if we are casually beginning a new stanza when in fact we are not - just as in the ambiguous stages of a love affair. The next collection, Rapture, is intensely personal, emotional and elegiac, and markedly different from Duffy’s other works.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. I surrender to extravagant poetry and the stormy powers of love and sex, and leap into the element of which we are composed, and use every muscle in our souls to stay afloat within.