Rapture

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The poem is a traditional sonnet comprising fourteen lines, and following loosely an ABAB CDCD EFEFGG rhyming pattern. It also follows the metrical rhythm usually associated with sonnets, iambic pentameter, that is five metrical feet or iambs per line, where a iamb is one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable. The three strong books that made her name in the Nineties blazed with voicings; with dramatic characters, a bomber, a psychopath, an American buying Manhattan. This voicing power emerged again in The World’s Wife, along with the same sharp humour, social criticism and satire. But those collections ended in love poems and you felt that this, in the end, was what really drove Duffy’s work. In Rapture, it comes to its full flowering: ruthless, sensuous, tender; utterly modern, utterly classical. ( Independent, 16 September 2005) The subject of her latest work [Rapture] is the specifics of love, not the specifics of the lovers. Its inhabitants could Some of Duffy's phrases will not let you be. Living our ordinary lives without passion, we are "queuing for death"; speaking ordinary phrases without telling the whole truth means that "words, / are the cauls of the unsaid". The grammar and the thematic structures of Duffy's poems can seem compacted, as in the opening line of "Rapture": "Thought of by you all day, I think of you." But if you sometimes have to work hard to unknot Duffy's sense, the unravelling rewards.

There was speculation that she might become Poet Laureate upon the death of Ted Hughes in 1999, but the post went to Andrew Motion. She declared that the position was worthwhile as it was ‘good to have someone who is prepared to say that poetry is part of our national life’, and in an interview in The Independent predicted that poetry would ‘become more important and take a larger part in our lives in the next century’. Finally appointed Poet Laureate in 2009, she was the first female and the first Scottish Poet Laureate in the role’s 400 year history.For example, though their passion is lit with a ‘flame, like talent’ however this passion is ‘under your skin,’ which implies that their love between them was hidden. The tombstone becomes significant to this point as well as it mentions ‘who’ll guess’ the meaning behind the ‘scars of your dates’, never knowing the love they were a part of. If love, as Padel suggests, has always been at the centre of her poetry, this is not only romantic and sexual, it is also both daughterly and intensely maternal. Myth and fairy-tale are vital to her imagining of the world, but they are given contemporary voices in her poems. The combination of tenderness and toughness, humour and lyricism, unconventional attitudes and conventional forms, has won her a very wide audience of readers and listeners. As fellow-poet Sean O’Brien wrote: ‘Poetry, like love, depends on a kind of recognition. So often with Duffy does the reader say, “Yes, that’s it exactly,” that she could well become the representative poet of the present day.’ This is an interesting subversion. With the previous line ending how it did the suggestion would appear to be that the narrator had drifted apart from their significant other but here it is suggesting that they have both drifted from themselves. Suggesting they have become different people. I would suggest that the tone is such that the narrator clearly doesn’t feel that this is a positive thing. Claiming that they stay trapped in time is interesting and causes a mixed message. How can you drift whilst trapped? The two ideas seem to conflict with one another and this helps to create an underlying tension. It gives the impression of uncertainty.

If sexual desire were anything but insatiable, it would be something else. If experience couldn’t let language in, there’d be no poem, only rain. From “Bridgewater Hall”: In Duffy’s poem the love she describes is fluctuating, romantic but also painful. Although it ultimately relates to a relationship on earth the religious hints are clearly present.

Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet. In 1983, Duffy won the National Poetry Competition and in 2009 she was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, becoming the first woman to receive the honour since its creation in 1616. Her collection Standing Female Nude (1985) established her as a key figure in poetry.

This is quite skilfully done as the narrator uses the word assonance to prove their point but also uses assonance in the line. Clever stuff! I think what is trying to be said here is that they try and break with the norm to attain bliss, but up until this point it doesn’t seem to have been working! Throughout the poem, there are a number of words that reference the physical body. These include “flesh,”“bones”“fingers,”“skull” and “blood.” While Duffy’s speaker might be romanticizing the physical parts of her relationship, she accepts what death will bring. She understands fully that every physical piece of her lover’s body, and her own body, will eventually be reduced to “brittle things.” Only the scenery endures: stars, moon, roses, graves [...] This is an elemental love ­ it could belong to any time were This is Duffy at her most serious - the poems are rich, beautiful and heart-rending in their exploration of the deepest recesses of human emotion, both joy and pain. These works are also her most formal - following in the tradition of Shakespeare and John Donne, Duffy’s contemporary love poems in this collection draw on the traditional sonnet and ballad forms. Rapture is a collection of poetry written by the Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy, the British poet laureate from 2009 to 2019. It marks her 37th work of poetry and has been described as "intensely personal, emotional and elegiac, and markedly different from Duffy’s other works" by the British Council. [1] Rapture was first published in 2005 in the UK by Picador, and in 2013 in the US, by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. [2]

Comments

Although Duffy typically subverts traditional expectations of relationships and romance in her poems, 'Hour' follows a more traditional form and structure. The poem itself has an intimate nature, as it represents a moment taken from Duffy's own life. However, the use of a traditional form indicates that Duffy is aware that the experience she is describing is essentially universal.

Duffy has been quoted as saying that she is ‘not interested, as a poet, in words like “plash” – Seamus Heaney words, interesting words. I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way’; and in the same Guardian profile, ‘Childhood is like a long greenhouse where everything is growing, it’s lush and steamy. It’s where poems come from’ (31 August, 2002). 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?” The change in perception is echoed here. The air is given sentience! And this is all possible because of the feeling of love. Perhaps the insinuation here is that love is like oxygen! (Maybe Duffy is a fan of the band Sweet!) As we celebrate Carol Ann Duffy’s decade as Poet Laureate, Dr Mari Hughes-Edwards offers a response to the themes of love and loss in her work What Will You Do Now with the Gift of Your Life? by Stephen Raw.The opening line is very short and this serves to highlight its importance. It acts almost like a prompt to a speaker who is giving a speech it announces what the following stanza will be about effectively. The second line and the narrator open up with a stunning oxymoron. This gives the reader a view of the narrator’s “torn-vision” of love. They describe the heart as being parched, this portrays the idea that the heart is thirsty, that it is longing for something that it just can’t have. This is a very dramatic way of describing the euphoric up-and-down feeling that a person gets when they are in love. Bird’s song is a classic piece of symbolism. In fact, it is so classic it could almost be considered a cliché. Duffy of course would know this and I think she uses it here with just a pinch of irony. Perhaps then the birds are not symbolic at all and the narrator is just taking in the scenery! Either way, this is a nice nod to romantic poetry drawing on nature to evoke certain emotions, in this case, love. She is a truly brilliant modern poet who has stretched our imaginations by putting the whole range of human experiences into lines that capture the emotions perfectly.” Rapture is studied as part of the OCR (EMC) A-Level qualification in English Language and Literature, across schools and colleges in England. Here is where the poem almost turns on its head. It is interesting that Duffy chose to make this transformation midway through a couplet. I wonder if this is deliberate and contains a sort of symbolism. Perhaps her way of saying that love can act at any time. Once again nature is used but here it seems to have far more positive connotations.