Carol Ann Duffy, one of the most significant names in contemporary British poetry, has achieved that rare feat of both critical and commercial success. Her work is read and enjoyed equally by critics, academics and lay readers, and it features regularly on both university syllabuses and school syllabuses. 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 word gaped in the final line may have significance as it has subtle sexual connotations as the word is often associated with an ill-fitting blouse. Another provocative piece of language used.

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And on Duffy’s other shoulder, H.D. is perched. In these poems, you’ll find finely wrought imagism. But prepare yourself for the sad volta. From all-love to not-love. The animate and inanimate elements of the planet mirror and respond to the poet’s inner world and experience, feeling strikingly rational. From “Wintering”: 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. From lines ten to twelve, time remains a present theme alongside allusions to nature, bringing traditional romantic imagery to the forefront of the poem. Duffy is operating on a different plane, ahistorical, archetypal, where ‘moon’ and ‘rose’ and ‘kiss’ come clear of the abuses of tradition to be restored to the poet’s lexicon, as the things of the world are restored to the lover.” Poet, playwright and freelance writer Carol Ann Duffy was born on 23 December 1955 in Glasgow and read philosophy at Liverpool University.

Clearly, there is a massive transformation and the tone of the poem has changed dramatically. It is at this point in the poem we start to understand why it is called the rapture. Speaking of which note once again the reference to heaven.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. 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.”

The trajectory of a love affair from its giddy beginnings, with poems of almost prelapsarian sensuality, to deep love Wouldn’t you love to know who this beloved is? From the poem “Name”, possibly a love poem to Marina Tsvetaeva (echoing “Poems for Blok”): 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! 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. Since the early 1980’s, Duffy has also worked as a playwright, having had her plays Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986), Loss (1986), and Casanova (2007) published and performed in various theatres.

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This is the third poem in Duffy’s collection entltled Rapture. Of the fifty-two poems eighteen are sonnets. The sonnet template is favoured by poets for serious subjects, including love. Duffy traces the progress of a love affair, with all its fluctuations, joys and heartache. Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time, and Rapture is essential reading for the broken-hearted of all ages' - Rose Tremain The final poem in the collection takes lines from Robert Browning as its epigraph: "That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, / Lest you should think he never could recapture / That first fine careless rapture!" The quotation gives Duffy both the title of her collection and the title for this poem - "Over". The affair may be "over", but in her verse she can sing it "over" and the effect is uplifting and thrilling.

The word ‘ elegy’ refers to a poem, which can be read in full here, of serious reflection, or more importantly a lament for the dead. In this case, the elegy is for Duffy’s lover that was lost to death, and her reactions and reflections on this. To begin, the bones are described as ‘brittle’, as though her lover was fragile, even precious to her, although fragile things are easily broken. Duffy then describes how beautiful the fingers are in their ‘little rings’, which could be a reference to a couple of things. 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.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] Duffy’s themes include language and the representation of reality; the construction of the self; gender issues; contemporary culture; and many different forms of alienation, oppression and social inequality. She writes in everyday, conversational language, making her poems appear deceptively simple. With this demotic style she creates contemporary versions of traditional poetic forms - she makes frequent use of the dramatic monologue in her exploration of different voices and different identities, and she also uses the sonnet form. Duffy is both serious and humorous, often writing in a mischievous, playful style - in particular, she plays with words as she explores the way in which meaning and reality are constructed through language. In this, her work has been linked to postmodernism and poststructuralism, but this is a thematic influence rather than a stylistic one: consequently, there is an interesting contrast between the postmodern content and the conservative forms. The word “Rapture” originally referred to the state of being, at the time of death, when a soul reached heaven and eternity in the presence of God. This ultimately came to mean extreme pleasure, earthly as well as religious. Free of particularity, of identifying characteristics about the lover who could be anyone but is not quite everyone' Rapture is a story of a love affair, from it's beginnings, through all its ups and downs to it's ending'