The poem is an elegy honouring a loved one who has died — Duffy’s close friend, the poet Adrian Henri, with whom she had a ten year relationship, ending in 1982. The dedication is to Catherine Marcangeli, his partner at the time of his death. Yet, Cleopatra is able to leverage her beauty to get what she wants, Duffy presents the woman’s power. The fact she reduces ‘Caesar’ to ‘gibbering’ displays the control she has. We know this is a sexual power by the location, ‘in bed’. Duffy suggests that Cleopatra gains power by accepting her beauty and using it to manipulate and control men.

The opening line of the poem instantly outlines what it going to be important within ‘ The Long Queen‘, the focus being on the Queen herself, and the length of her reign, ‘couldn’t die’. The harsh end stop following this line compounds a sense of certainty, the statement emphasized through this grammatical structure. Another technique that Duffy uses throughout Beautiful is a caesura. Following or preceding important phrases within the poem, Duffy uses caesura. This caesura creates a slight metrical pause within the line. This pause then places emphasis on what comes before or after the caesura. In doing this, Duffy can focus the poem on key ideas without disrupting the rhythm of reading. In many places, this caesura appears incredibly blunt, such as ‘Beauty is fame.’, emphasizing the harshness of this statement. Duffy focuses on the physical strength of Helen’s pursuers. They have been described as ‘heaving an ore’, ‘tattooed’, and ‘muscle’. The masculinity present within these descriptions furthers the gender dynamic of the poem. Duffy is exploring how women are prosecuted by men, the poet constantly referring to the semantics of masculinity. The poem comprises seven six-lined stanzas. They are carefully structured with lines of increasing length, as if gradually building her power and authority. The consistency reflects the stability of her reign. The first section is varied in structure. Some paragraphs are short, while some are long. Duffy could be using the freeform structure of the section to reflect the myth of Helen of Troy. As a character born from myth, Duffy represents this fantasy depiction through the energetic and changing structure. The final stanza measures only two lines, perhaps reflecting her subjection at the hands of a patriarchal society. The shortened stanza represents her eventual demise and minimization in history.The rest of this stanza focuses on the monotony of her game city, Duffy using images of industry. Indeed, ‘railway station’, ’trains’‘operation’ all contain ideas of bleak scenery. Even the trains themselves are personified as ‘sigh[ing] on the platforms’. Duffy presents a grey scene of her home town, the only thing exciting her is ‘pining’ for escape. Be it ‘Glasgow, London, Liverpool’, anything that will allow her to escape from the city she has grown up in. The second character discussed is Cleopatra, the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt. She ruled from 51-30BC. Cleo, similarly to Helen of Troy, is a figure much favored by art and literature. In 30 BC, her naval fleet (including her husband, Mark Anthony) was defeated. This led to Antony’s suicide. Once Cleopatra learned of this, she killed herself by poisoning. While history is not certain if this death comes from self-poison or being bitten by an asp, many believe she self-inflicted the snake bite. The third section explores Marilyn Monroe. The first two stanzas contain 9 lines, while the second two contain 10. This section is carefully regulated, but not so much as the fourth. The fact the stanzas get longer as this section progresses could reflect how controlling the media were of Marilyn. As she advanced in her career, the media began to show more of her, represented through the lengthening structure. Yet, even in these stanzas, there is an element of regularity. Monroe’s life was heavily controlled by the media, which wanted her to be depicted in a certain way. Duffy uses structure to reflect these ideas, emulating her life through the structure.

Are these poems placed at the end to the book to signal a movement or development? We shall have to wait for the next book to know. For the moment Duffy prefers to wear a tougher face, and to keep her voice jaunty. She moves through the lives she invents with a kind of casual confidence which her characters sometimes briefly share, like the shopaholic who The past is depicted as tragic and oppressive. The lexis Duffy employs, ‘crying’, ‘snarl’, and ‘shrieks’ create a nightmarish scene of memory. She cannot escape these memories, the sound-based verbs calling out after her. Even the ‘motorway’ she uses to escape ‘groaned’, everything reminding her of her hometown. when the law would change . Tears: salt pearls, bright jewels for the Long Queen's fingers to weigh as she counted their sorrow. The hallucinatory, almost feverish, presentation of Monroe’s life begins with ‘slept’. Duffy presents the woman exploited from the moment she wakes right till she sleeps. Everything in between is connected with hellish asyndeton, propelling the poem onwards, ‘coffee, pills, booze’. The reference to addictive substances foreshadows Monroe’s death, overdosing on sleeping pills. Firstly, the consonance across ‘deep, dumped’ creates a sense of oppression, the language flowing in hypnotic circles. Furthermore, the plosive ‘p’ within both these words cuts through the narrative, representing the brutality Monroe experienced on a daily basis.Duffy employs many techniques within this expansive poem. Yet, one that appears consistently throughout is a caesura. Indeed, Duffy uses caesura within Map-Woman to control the speed of reading, some parts slowed by the employment of caesura. These slight metrical pauses allow Duffy to emphasize certain moments. Indeed, ‘waiting to start’, is encased in caesura, grammatically isolated. The two pauses around this phrase, caused by a caesura, lead to a slower reading, reflecting the character waiting through her youth until she is old enough to leave. Duffy controls the rhythm, using caesura to place emphasis on many key moments within ‘ The Map Woman‘. The self-scrutiny Duffy presents, ‘stared in the mirror’ connects with the theme of the female body. Hyper-aware of how she comes across, the Map-Woman scrutinizes her own body. The image of ‘both arms raised over her head’ seems almost like surrender. It seems that she is beginning to give up on her dreams of change, giving in to her inescapable identity. The stories of the women are told by a third person narrator. The tone is ironic and bleakly humorous. The pace is fast, relying particularly on lists that carry their own significance to the reader.

References to Queen Elizabeth I, who rejected various suitors. 'Long Queen' could be seen as patron saint of women, as she rejects most patriarchal standards Out of this ugliness women metamorphose under our eye. A shopaholic becomes a shop. 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. Helen of Troy changes into Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe puts Sinatra on her record player before going off to sing "Happy Birthday" to President Kennedy. The dubious gift of beauty passes to Princess Diana, who obediently widens her eyes for the flashbulbs of the press. Helen and Cleopatra elude us with a certain dignity - well, they are essentially myths - but in our latterday world, to be desired brings more danger than privilege and has precious little to do with magic. Diana is insulted even as she smiles, and will soon feel "History's stinking breath in her face". The fourth section discusses Princess Diana. This is the most structurally confined section of the text, being written in quatrains. These carefully planned stanzas could reflect the pressure on Diana to conform to the stereotypes of a princess. Her life was measured and directly compared to other royals, the pressure on her immeasurable. Duffy emulates this pressure by confining the structure to a particular style – representing Diana’s entrapment through the form and structure of this section. The language is a mix of colloquial and lyrical, the opening stanza about Helen of Troy being a good example, with “divinely fair” juxtaposed with “drop-dead gorgeous”.

Duffy likes to take a familiar psychological reality and extend it as an outrageous metaphor. In "The Map Woman", for instance, an A-to-Z street map of the town in which a woman has grown up is tattooed over the skin of her whole body. Wherever she goes, and whatever she becomes, that geography remains an indelible pattern she cannot escape; until, that is, almost accidentally, she hits on the remedy. She decides to return to the real town that haunts her. In the intervening years, the place she remembers has become almost unrecognisable under newly built arcades and shopping malls. Bewildered by these changes, she retreats to her hotel room. There, she sloughs her skin like a snake. In the last verse, Duffy escapes from the metaphor to close the poem with a resonance that recalls some of Larkin's memorable conclusions: The one word title is a loaded adjective, which carries different associations in the mind of each reader. The irony is that the lives of the beautiful women, explored in the poem, were difficult, contrasting tragically to their physical loveliness.

Again, Duffy references the female body, blood from her period mixing with ‘soap suds’ and transforming the colour to ‘pink’. 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. The syntax of the opening line also places ‘my breasts’ at a focal point, the meter of the line falling upon the word ‘breasts’. This, too, places the feminine experience in plain sight, Duffy making clear the female body in her narrative depiction of a new history.One of these is mythological, Helen of Troy. One stems from ancient history, Cleopatra. Finally, both Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana come from more recent history. Despite the status they held and the time period they lived through, these women were all equally prosecuted and exploited. Flowers’ are often used as a stereotypical symbol of fertility and the delicate nature of women. Yet, by connecting with ‘sore’, placing this adjective before ‘flowers’, Duffy removes this archetypical notion of how women should portray themselves, tainting ‘flowers’ with an aching pain ‘sore’. This speaks to the female experience, childbirth is incredibly painful, and the delicate ‘flower’ symbol of women is ridiculous, Duffy transforms the image into something more realistic through the use of this oxymoron.