Rapture

Product Information

Text’. The title gives a clue as to the subject of this poem: it’s about text-messaging; aptly, it’s short and telegrammatic, like a text message (with even the shape of the poem suggesting the format of a text message on a mobile phone). It’s also a touching poem, marked by that quiet desperation of something lost or unattainable, a quality which characterises much of Duffy’s greatest work. CAROL: So, it only kind of evolved over a period of time — the poems in The World’s Wife— I hadn’t intended to do it or known that I would do it. I very much enjoyed doing it and each time I wrote a poem, I’d be dealing with that and then it seemed that it would become a collection, but over maybe two or three years. It’s an organic process, rather than a project. Now when you introduce, or any poet introduces, poetry at a poetry reading— MILLY: Um, I was just going to say that obviously this journal is going to be edited by BA and MA students in Creative Writing. Is there anything that you’d kind of like touch on in terms of like, what’s the most important, kind of, almost philosophy to have going into a career of writing, or you said earlier that you don’t really think of it as a career being a poet, but like when you kind of— Today’s “love poems” are deprived of those true love feelings that great poets like Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne, Shelley, and Barrett Browning would vent out through their poems. Similar to the first stanza, the poet has extracted lines from previous love poems. For example; line like “dear heart, how like you this?” has been taken from Sir Thomas Wyatt’s ‘ They Flee From Me’; “look in thy heart and write”, is extracted from Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. Additionally, there is a line like “there is a garden in her face” which the poet has drawn from the poem with the same title by Thomas Campion.

Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy - The Rumpus Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy - The Rumpus

CAROL: So, you’ve got an audience there who might not have read the poem and you’ve also in a sense having to keep their attention or entertain them, you might introduce the poem by saying ‘I enjoy subversing this—MILLY: Yeah, so obviously you’ve just finished your tenure as the Poet Laureate, um, and alongside being the first female Poet Laureate, you’re also the first openly gay Poet Laureate for Britain. With this, did you find it was hard to balance the idea of being vocal about women’s rights and gay rights and being, like, an activist or would you say that some of your poetry is an act of activism, perhaps? 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. 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? The Love Poem’ by Carol Ann Duffy depicts a modern poet struggling in her thoughts to write a love poem.

Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy | Waterstones

CAROL: was retell the story from Ovid's metamorphoses of Midas and I decided to do that from the point of view of Mrs Midas— CAROL: You write with your five senses, you write with your memory, your points of view, your language, and all that comes to bear on the poems one writes, but I wouldn’t think I’ve ever written a poem for a reason beyond writing a poem, so I don’t think of myself at all as an activist although, um, I’m in favour of activism but I think it’s a different talent.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”. The Love Poem’ by Carol Ann Duffy consists of three stanzas. Each stanza of the poem has 12 verses. However, the poem is modern or modern in some respects, as the term “modern’ came to be defined by modernism, wherein it departs from regular metrical schemes and is fragmented or semi-fragmented in appearance as well as in meaning. CAROL: Yeah, I don’t really know . . . I suppose I don’t think of being a poet in terms of having a career. So for me, every new piece of work or new poem I start is what’s exciting and interesting about being, um, a poet and . . . one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in that writing life is writing poetry for children, which I didn’t do until my daughter was born, because I only wrote for adults. She’s twenty-three now, and when she was around two or three, I suddenly found that I wanted to write poems to share with her, for her, so that was the most surprisingly and lovely thing that happened to me as a poet, writing for children.

Rapture (poetry collection) - Wikipedia

Comparing the modern love poets with the classical ones, the poet says that the earlier love poets were truth-tellers, but such an opinion can hardly be made about modern love poets. To best represent the love feelings of the earlier love poets, the poet has extracted and used several verses from the past love poems and used them to express the feeling of love that has changed over the period. CAROL: (Long pause) Well again, it’s interesting when people ask you questions because the question comes from the way the questioner thinks. RORY: So the consequences are very much a secondary part then of what you want to write? You write something, you’re like ‘okay, this expresses what I believe, I’m going to put this out into the world,’ what the consequences are of that, what people interpret that as, that’s not what I’m thinking of, it's more about what I want to write, rather than what effect it could have. In the first line of this stanza, once again, the narrator makes reference to an hour. Again it isn’t clear if this is an actual hour or is just meant to represent a small amount of time. I think in the first two lines of this stanza that the suggestion is that the dark feelings the narrator had been having were a result of waiting for their wedding. The image of making a ring from grass is quite nice as it invokes nature, as we have seen a few times in this poem. But on this occasion, it is done in a less trite way. Perhaps this is to emphasize the fact that sometimes love isn’t about passion and drama, sometimes it’s about nuanced gestures and subtle sweetness. This has often been interpreted as a slight, and evidence that Shakespeare did not love his wife. Others, however, have suggested that the will doesn’t mention all the other possessions the Bard probably left his wife because they would be dealt with separately, and that the ‘second best bed’ – far from being a snub – refers to the married couple’s own marital bed, with the best bed in the house being reserved for guests. Carol Ann Duffy follows this latter interpretation in ‘Anne Hathaway’, quoting the notorious line from Shakespeare’s will as the epigraph to her poem. Duffy cleverly uses the fourteen-line verse form to suggest the sonnet – and that poem’s close associations with Anne Hathaway’s husband – without actually giving us an out-and-out Shakespearean sonnet, or mere copy of her husband’s preferred poem.O my America! my new-found land” is extracted from another John Donne poem, ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ When the narrator says that there is “no name or number to the hour” what they are saying seems a little ambiguous. I think the point they are trying to make is that the time of the night is irrelevant. That they don’t really care about it because there is an emotion that is prevailing and making something that might seem important on an ordinary night seem unimportant. In the third line, Duffy uses Scottish colloquialism in the form of the word “skelf” this word describes a splinter and she is using it here to suggest that there isn’t even a hint of light. This darkness that is being described is a metaphor for the dark place that the narrator feels they are in.

Feature: Beyond Rapture – The Poetry Society Feature: Beyond Rapture – The Poetry Society

MILLY: I was here when you last came to the University and did your talk in the Issac Newton Building, and when you last came you spoke a little bit about subversion and finding something in something that’s already been written. Is that something that you practice a lot in your writing, like looking at other poet’s work or just like found items, do you kind of try and find— MILLY: So like, the idea of subverting things and, like, looking at something that has already been written. In the fourth line, Duffy expands on her description so it isn’t just visual but draws on the sense of smell as well. This gives the emotions of the narrator a very visceral feel. She takes something that you would expect to smell sweet and ascribes it a negative scent which says a lot about the mindset of the narrator. The final line is enjambment. This is uncommon at the end of a stanza and creates a sense of awkwardness.Valentine’. An onion? This poem, also from Mean Time , centres on the speaker’s gift to her Valentine, not of a red rose or a cute card but an onion, of all things – because it cuts through the clichéd conventions of Valentine’s Day and, oddly, captures what true love is far more accurately, because it will induce tears but its memory will also linger long on your lips.