In many of her poems, Duffy explores the depth and complexity of love.With reference to any three of Duffy’s poems, discuss the importance of this theme in her work.
Love is an important theme in Duffy’s work. She is best known for writing love poems. Mrs lazarus, Havisham, and Valentine are excellent examples which illustrates the depth and complexity of love. In Valentine she shows the positive and negative sides about love by comparing love to an onion. Mrs lazarus a fine poem which includes a multi-dimensional love. In this poem she constructs a version of love which differs from the stereotype. Duffy also uses love in ‘Havisham’ to explore heartbreak and the destructive power of love as Havisham has been driven insane after being abandoned by her ex-lover.
Valentine and Havisham are poem from the collection Mean Time, published in 1993. It is thought that these poems provided the inspiration for Duffy’s first themed collection of poetry The World’s Wife (1999). Mrs lazarus is one of the poems from The World’s wife (1999).
Valentine is a verse form with a first-person speaker. every stanza is incredibly short, and several others are just one line long. this form echoes the layers of an onion itself.The literary work may be a first-person narrative, self-addressed to a second person ‘you’. The speaker uses informal everyday speech, without elaborate metaphor and simile; suitably because the message is concerning unconventionality, nonetheless sincerity. She does, however, create an ironic relation to the standard platitudes inciting the ‘moon wrapped in brown paper’ and ‘red rose’ and ‘wedding ring’, for instance. Duffy’s aim is to invert the standard expressions of love.
Havisham is written from the point of view of Miss Havisham from great Expectations by Charles Dickens. This key character was abandoned on her wedding day and, in her grief and anger, lives frozen in time, immersed in bitterness and resentment.
For the title of the poem, Duffy drops the honorific “Miss” as if to point that she no longer qualifies for the distinction of such an address. She is just Havisham – not an unmarried woman, not a spouse and not a widow.
Mrs. Lazarus is a first-person narrative in eight, five-line, free-verse stanzas. it’s a dramatic monologue in which the speaker, Mrs. Lazarus, step by step reveals her story and therefore the reader pieces together the deeper implications. Duffy uses a combination of informal conversational language, with lyrical snatches.
‘Valentine’ focuses on the speaker’s unusual perspective of love to prove to her lover that as she has put more thought into the onion she offers as a gift, rather than clichéd Valentine’s Day gifts, their love will endure. By metaphorically comparing the onion to ‘a moon wrapped in brown paper’, she conveys real romantic gifts do not need to be embellished or concealed within expensive wrapping. She has put so much thought and care into offering something unique which represents love more honestly than ‘a cute card or a kissogram’ Symbolically, ‘ the onion ‘promises light’ for a more positive and hopeful relationship ‘due to the honesty shared by the speaker who focuses on both the joy and pain love can bring.
In ‘Havisham’ Duffy takes on the persona of Mrs Havisham from Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’ to show how love and relationships can lead to heartbreak, hatred and even madness. Duffy begins the poem with the provocative opening line: “Beloved sweetheart bastard.” By using an oxymoron, Duffy highlights the conflicting feelings of love and hate Havisham feels for her ex-lover. Though he has broken her heart and she named him “bastard”, he in some way is still adored and cherished by her, albeit in an obsessive, unhealthy manner. Duffy uses Havisham’s experience of love and relationships to highlight how love can turn into hatred as the feelings are both extremes of emotion that seems at odds with one another yet can often become inseparable after a relationship has dissolved.
Duffy also uses ‘Havisham’ to bring the reader’s’ attention to the devastation of heartbreak as she spends “Whole days/in bed cawing Nooooo at the wall”. Her use of the word “cawing” has connotations of the shrieking of crows or other birds which have a harsh, painful cry, suggesting that Havisham has spent days weeping and has lost her voice. Here Duffy draws the reader’s’ attention to how the awful pain of lost love can lead to a debilitating depression as Havisham can only voice her disbelief and anguish through the long, drawn out moans of “Noooo” to express her pain. Duffy refuses to create an idealized, unrealistic impression of heartbreak as it would be untrue to many people’s’ experience of love and relationships.
Duffy plays further upon the terrible consequences of love as she goes on to describe how Havisham’s heartbreak has driven her to insanity and murderous thoughts: “I stabbed at a wedding cake. /Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon.” Here Duffy overturns the traditional, romantic idea of weddings and honeymoons from something dreamy and pleasant into something more dark, sinister and extremely violent through the use of words such as “stabbed” and “corpse”. All Havisham is left with is anger: a rage which shows itself in her violent fantasies where she longs to see her former lover dead. Once again we see how Duffy uses language to subvert our traditional, romanticized views of love and relationships to show us the bitter truth about love: while love may seem eternal, it is also an impermanent, changeable, and often painful emotion.
In Mrs lazarus Duffy describes the real but dwindling grief of the wife of Lazarus, in a rewriting of the biblical story of Lazarus (John 11: 11-44). The poem deals with something like the death or expiration date of love. In doing so, “Mrs. Lazarus” seems to question the metaphysical dimension usually attributed to love. Since love takes place between human beings, love dies when one of the lovers dies. The poem thus constructs a version of love which differs from the stereotype. Herein resides much of its power
Duffy insists that rejecting the metaphysical dimension of love does not question the love of Mrs. Lazarus for her husband, as she “had grieved” (l.1). The loss of the beloved turns Mrs Lazarus into an animal by taking from her her reason. This take place both in terms of meaning – “ripped”, “howled”, “shrieked”, “clawed”, “bled”, “retched” (stanza 1) – as much as sound – the verbs are composed of monosyllabic words in which plosives abound. The desperation of such naturalisation also finds expression in the frustrated sexuality that emerges in lines 7 – “empty glove” –and 11 – “gaunt nun in the mirror, touching herself”.
Duffy aims at something healthy: she dares to bring love down to earth, make it more natural and pare down some metaphysical because idealized and therefore inhuman outgrowths of love
