Rapture

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Rapture is a story of a love affair, from it's beginnings, through all its ups and downs to it's ending' 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.

Which other famous Duffy poem uses imagery associated with materialism? Here's a clue: the poem opens with 'I give you an onion '. 'Hour' by Carol Ann Duffy: themes The theme of time is introduced at the opening of the poem, with the metaphor ' Love’s time’s beggar' - indicating that love often pleads with time to wait. However time's control is also subverted early on, through the phrase 'but even/ a single hour' indicating that while lovers often wish for time to slow down, they are still able to enjoy the moments and escape its complete control.Born in 1955 in Glasgow, Duffy was brought up in Staffordshire. As a student in Liverpool she wrote poems and plays, became involved with "the scene" and Adrian Henry. With the collection Standing Female Nude (1985) she established her name. Three other important collections followed: Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990) and Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread poetry award and the Forward prize. For someone who has made a comparatively quiet career, away from the public eye and the literary celebrity round, she has a loyal following and a high profile. When the appointment of a new poet laureate was last in the news, it was she who commanded the popular vote. She was made a CBE in 2001. Carol Ann Duffy is also an acclaimed playwright, and has had plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London. Her plays include Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986) and Loss (1986), a radio play. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 1984 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1992 from the Society of Authors, the Dylan Thomas Award from the Poetry Society in 1989 and a Lannan Literary Award from the Lannan Foundation (USA) in 1995. She was awarded an OBE in 1995, a CBE in 2001 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.

Logan, William (11 April 2013). "Heart's Desire". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 24 June 2019. If a poem endures, the life is between the reader and the poem. The poet should not be in the way.' 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. the poems are rich, beautiful and heart-rending in their exploration of the deepest recesses of human emotion, both joy and pain. " 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.”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 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. The poem has a romantic tone, underpinned by its stylistic similarities to poems associated with the romanticism literary movement. Duffy's use of allusions to the natural world are particularly effective at creating a traditionally romantic style. Imagery The idea that the time lovers spend together should not be spent on objects such as flowers, highlights how the emotion of love can transcend both time and the material world. Duffy uses a beautiful description here referring to the clouds as a prayer of rain. This is a nice nod to the poem’s religious title and actually in itself is quite a clever collective noun for clouds. The end of the line is enjambment and this helps the pace of the poem, although it is an enjambment line it does not dismiss the rhyming pattern.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. 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.

Although time is the enemy of love, the emotion of love and the moments spent with a lover exist outside the limits of time.Free of particularity, of identifying characteristics about the lover who could be anyone but is not quite everyone' Reynolds, Margaret (7 January 2006). "Review: Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 19 July 2019. 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. Founded in 2009, The Rumpus is one of the longest running independent online literary and culture magazines. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love. Sonnet sequence: a group of sonnets written by one poet with a unifying theme or story. 'Hour' by Carol Ann Duffy: summary 'Hour' by Carol Ann Duffy: Summary and Analysis