The main themes of Rapture are love, loss, loneliness, gender issues, and death. [ citation needed] Reception [ edit ] 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. Each of these subscription programs along with tax-deductible donations made to The Rumpus through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, helps keep u s going and brings us closer to sustainability. The Rumpus is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of The Rumpus must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

RAPTURE - CRITICAL VIEWS WHAT THE PAPERS SAID RAPTURE - CRITICAL VIEWS WHAT THE PAPERS SAID

They further go on to explain the strong emotions that love makes them feel. The image of a tiger, ready to kill is particularly striking. The narrator uses powerful words to convey a dark undertone to the poem. In this third line you can see the words “kill”, “flame” and “fierce” none of these would be readily associated with love, but have a stronger association with lust and desire. The stanza is rounded off by the narrator talking about how their loved one entered their life. How they strolled in. This, at least for me, created an image of somebody with nonchalance and arrogance. 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?” CAROL: The poetic, literary. So, this interview is with a poet. I think in terms of the poem and how I might approach, um, a poem, how I might rewrite it, why am I writing it, what’s the poem about, how does the poem stand in tangent between form and content. I’m not thinking in any way other than in a literary way when I’m writing. The poem presents itself in one single stanza but is effectively a sonnet as it contains fourteen lines. It seems to be a classic Shakespearean sonnet with the rhyming pattern ABABCDCDEFEFGG. It also ties into this tradition by being written in iambic pentameter. The poem, as is commonly the case with sonnets, is a love poem of sorts. The Love Poem’by Carol Ann Duffy talks about how the poet can’t find appropriate expressions while she tries to write a love poem. She remains blank and thoughts like clouds appear and leave. Ironically, the cloud, in the poet’s case, doesn’t have a silver lining. However, throughout the poem, she quotes the first or the important lines from famous love sonnets and lyrics. Specifically, in the first stanza, the poet struggles to find proper words to write her poem. In the following stanza, the poet is thoughtless. She can’t find hope in herself that she can write a poem or not. Whereas, in the last stanza, the poet somehow manages to start again, with new hope and a burning desire like the moth, desirous of the “star”.Her adult poetry collections are Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Other Country (1990); Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year); The World's Wife (1999); Feminine Gospels (2002), a celebration of the female condition; Rapture (2005), winner of the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Bees (2011), winner of the 2011 Costa Poetry Award and shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Christmas Truce (2011), Wenceslas: A Christmas Poem (2012), illustrated by Stuart Kolakovic; Dorothy Wordsworth's Christmas Birthday (2014) and Sincerity (2018). Her children's poems are collected in New & Collected Poems for Children (2009). 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 same year, she was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize. The voice is that of a first person speaker, we can assume the poet, using the pronoun “I”, and referring to “we” of the relationship.

I am in heaven, I am in hell | Carol Ann Duffy | The Guardian

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. CAROL: Yes, when you’re writing a poem you’re solving the problem of writing a poem, so it’s the poet and the piece of paper and the language and what happens in that event in language when you’re writing. There isn’t really the sense of anything other than that when I’m writing. The narrator is clearly feeling at a loss as to what to do to better their situation. Although that situation has yet to be revealed. Once again just a classic example of how Duffy manages to get her readers to invest in her poems. The second line sees the narrator implore the subject of the poem. They call for them to “endure this hour” is the suggestion here that what they are going through is temporary. I don’t think they are talking literally about an hour but rather a difficult time period that this hour of darkness represents. CAROL: My poems are going to come out of my life if they’re autobiographical; they’re going to come out of my imagination if I’m making up new myths or tall tales . . . When we write, in my case, poetry, you write with all of yourself. RORY: Well you, y’know, your poetry and your former status as a Poet Laureate would’ve, kind of . . . You would’ve thought that it would’ve inspired more people, especially more women to get into poetry. Would you say that you’ve left, like, a legacy there then, for future female poets to follow their dreams?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. CAROL: (Long pause) Well again, it’s interesting when people ask you questions because the question comes from the way the questioner thinks.