Rapture

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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. The trajectory of a love affair from its giddy beginnings, with poems of almost prelapsarian sensuality, to deep love 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. Duffy has been quoted as saying that she is ‘not interested, as a poet, in words like “plash” – Seamus Heaney words, interesting words. I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way’; and in the same Guardian profile, ‘Childhood is like a long greenhouse where everything is growing, it’s lush and steamy. It’s where poems come from’ (31 August, 2002).

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. From lines ten to twelve, time remains a present theme alongside allusions to nature, bringing traditional romantic imagery to the forefront of the poem. Rapture is studied as part of the OCR (EMC) A-Level qualification in English Language and Literature, across schools and colleges in England.

Resource summary

Sean O’Brien, ‘Carol Ann Duffy: a stranger here myself’ in The Deregulated Muse (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1998) Once again the sky is referenced but the change of tone changes the view of the sky. Here the sky is still described as large but there are suggestions of it being a network joining places together. Perhaps a metaphor for how the narrator is now joined with their lover? The second line is full of innuendo. The narrator goes to “bed” which you could associate with sex and then says that they dreamed of the other person “hard” which may not be an innuendo but the fact that it is used twice for emphasis suggests that it is indeed an innuendo! The third line refers to the way that the narrator’s love interest’s name sounds. The description is very melodramatic and over the top, this emphasizes the passion they feel. In closing the stanza they claim that the way they are feeling is like a spell. This once again suggests that it is beyond their control and that it is something that is being done unto them rather than an experience they are necessarily enjoying. These poems are almost old-fashioned in their commitment to rhyme, assonance and metre. In several poems there is a fairytale vocabulary, and ballad forms appear in "Betrothal" and in "Give":

The three strong books that made her name in the Nineties blazed with voicings; with dramatic characters, a bomber, a psychopath, an American buying Manhattan. This voicing power emerged again in The World’s Wife, along with the same sharp humour, social criticism and satire. But those collections ended in love poems and you felt that this, in the end, was what really drove Duffy’s work. In Rapture, it comes to its full flowering: ruthless, sensuous, tender; utterly modern, utterly classical. ( Independent, 16 September 2005) 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!) 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.

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Nonetheless, Feminine Gospels (2002), as the title suggests, is a concentration on the female point of view. It is a celebration of female experience, and it has a strong sense of magic and fairytale discourse. However, as in traditional fairytales, there is sometimes a sense of darkness as well as joy. Birth, death and the cycles and stages of life feature strongly, including menstruation, motherhood and aging. Duffy’s beloved daughter Ella was born in 1995, and her experience of motherhood has deeply influenced her poetry (as well as inspiring her to write other works for children). Poems such as 'The Cord' and 'The Light Gatherer' rejoice in new life, while ‘Death and the Moon’ mourns those who have passed on: ‘[…] I cannot say where you are. Unreachable / by prayer, even if poems are prayers. Unseeable / in the air, even if souls are stars […]’. 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 Secondly, it could be a reference to how the rings of a tree can tell its age, suggesting that the rings of their finger shows the years of their relationship within them. Aside from this, in the second, Duffy also uses much positive, yet physical imagery to describe the traits of her lover. The metaphor‘blessed in your flesh, blood, and hair, as though they were lovely garments’ seems to show her gratefulness for the closeness the two experienced, to the point as though they were connected as one being. Also, the very presence of her lover seemed to ‘pleasure the air’, which also seems to lift the melancholy air the poem holds. All this physical imagery could be linked to how Duffy feels they have such a close connection in their relationship.

Although time is the enemy of love, the emotion of love and the moments spent with a lover exist outside the limits of time. 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. 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. Poetry is above all, a series of intense moments... I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotions' Jane Dowson and Alice Entwhistle, ‘Dialogic politics in Carol Ann Duffy and others’ in A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)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. 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. 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]