Feminine Gospels

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This, the first poem in the collection Feminine Gospels, sets the tone and establishes the scope in relation to all aspects of womanhood; their individual and collective experiences. The use of ‘fled’ plays into the semantics of hunter and prey, with Helen being reduced to a fleeing animal. Considering Duffy has made identity into a visual thing on her skin, the act of disappearing would fit in with changing identity.

Asyndeton is once again used across the end of the fourth stanza, Duffy linking together names for Helen. The use of line breaks and capitalization (or lack of) allows the reader see emphasis on the important ideas of the poem.Even ‘pale’, sometimes seen as a symbol of sickness, is glorified on Dianna, ‘beautifully’ attached to this quality. This can be understood as a representation of life, the infinite possibilities stretching out before her.

Sub‘ by Carol Ann Duffy explores the restructuring of history to place women in the roles of men, hence the title of ‘sub’ referring to substituting one person for another. They treat her poorly, the commanding ‘ Act like a fucking princess’ demonstrating the notion that she was forced to embody a certain type of person. The feminine connotation of ‘pink’ being built from the mixture of water and blood, an undeniable sign that the female body is present and will not be hidden. One of the most important lines in the poem, ‘Over her breast was the heart of the town’, stems in this second stanza. In the second stanza, asyndeton is used to encompass all types of women, the endless list attempting to capture every representation of women.The ‘heart’, representing the center of this ‘town’ is above the woman’s ‘breast’, being held close to her own heart. Past superstars could draw crowds in their hundreds, but who, other than Seamus Heaney, commands that today? From the sadness of Elizabeth I, looking back on her long and powerful but lonely life, to the travails of a woman whose work is literally never done as she continues to trawl the seas to feed her billion offspring, to a movingly lyrical reflection on the beauty of a growing child, Carol Ann Duffy explores in this volume the myriad components of women's lives and loves through the crystallizing prism of poetry. The sixth stanza of the poem explores ‘Motherhood’, with this confining Duffy till her daughter ‘started school’. Duffy is causing the reader to begin to question these very hard and true facts of everyday life in extraordinary circumstances and representations as a way of allowing the reader to become uncomfortable with themselves.

Some of these are internal, which propel the meter of the poem onward, leading to moments of climax within the narrative. It is one thing to examine celebrity and analyze it; it is very different when a poet begins to explain how that celebrity may effect the general population. It is worth comparing this with Duffy’s poem Work, which acknowledges the pressures on women who combine motherhood with earning a living. Duffy uses asyndeton across the second and third stanzas, detailing those who lived in her town before her. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T.

In "Beautiful", a series of women appear to be manifestations of the same being, defined only by the ability to excite the desire of men. Asyndeton allows Duffy to place items over an item on her skin, hiding her identity under clothes and other superficial items.

Duffy explores ‘grey-haired teachers of English and History’, those which had an impact on her life. The identity she formed as a child has followed her forever, represented by the constant presence of the map. The reader is given an extensive list of characters in “The Laughter” which represent dynamic women in varying situations of school, work, and personal life. She was emblematic of America’s changing attitudes to sexuality, becoming a sex symbol of the 1950s and 60s.Taylor’s Version) [From The Vault] Now That We Don’t Talk (Taylor’s Version) [From The Vault] Say Don’t Go (Taylor’s Version) [From The Vault] “Slut! The use of an end stop following this phrase further compounds the assurance of these words, ‘certain’ having metrical emphasis. The lack of specificity in regards to the character within the opening line could suggest that this is an ‘every-woman’, representing all of the women. Duffy also varies sentence length, separating them with caesurae and end-stops, creating pauses to reinforce the significance of each thought.