Study Like a Boss
Anna Quindlen, Bill Bryson, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tertullian, Thomas Paine, 1984, A Raisin in The Sun, Animal Farm, Beowulf, Fahrenheit 451, Frankenstein, George Orwell, Hamlet, Into The Wild, Lord of The Flies, A Modest Proposal, All Quiet on The Western Front, Allegory, Antigone, Between The World and Me.
I am going to talk about two different kinds of love: mature love and religious love. I will compare Love (III) by George Hilbert (religious) and Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy (mature) and show the contrasts and trends in both. These two poems have distinct meanings, as one of them relates to religion and Jesus’ … Read more
In the poem ‘The Map Woman’, Carol Ann Duffy uses the extended metaphor of a map being printed on a woman’s body to explore ideas surrounding hometowns, childhood and nostalgia. This is immediately introduced in the first line where the reader learns that ‘A woman’s skin was the map of the town where she’d grown … Read more
Carol Ann Duffy wrote ‘The World’s Wife’ in order to scrutinize the representation of both men and women, inspired by her strong feminist views — reconstructing, for example, many of the ‘voiceless women’ from throughout history. As Duffy expressed it; ‘like sand and the oyster it’s a creative irritant. In each poem, I’m trying to … Read more
Duffy presents gender in the poems Litany and Havisham through society’s views and expectations of women, and the effects it has on them show how being female was harmful to their wellbeing. Litany creates an example of the ideal, successful woman. The reference to the brand ‘American Tan’ creates the image of all-American women – … Read more
‘Mrs Midas’ is a revisionist version of the King Midas story told from the female perspective: traditionally, this ancient Greek myth was about a man who could turn everything to gold with a touch. This poem explores the sadness Mrs Midas feels in regards to not being able to feel the touch of her husband … Read more
“Salome” is a poem taken from Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of poems The World’s Wife; most of the poems share a common feature: a historically marginalized narrator retelling the story from personal perspective. Salome’s character originally appeared in the New Testament and over the centuries many novels and paintings focused on Salome and the legend … Read more
Queen Herod is taken from Duffy’s The World’s Wife, a collection which inverts gender roles to celebrate female characters and display the injustice of men’s generalizations. This poem inverts the gender roles in the biblical story of the arrival of the Magi for Jesus’s birth and the Massacre of the Innocents ordered by King Herod. … Read more
Duffy presents gender in the poems Litany and Havisham through society’s views and expectations of women, and the effects it has on them show how being female was harmful to their wellbeing. Litany creates an example of the ideal, successful woman. The reference to the brand ‘American Tan’ creates the image of all-American women – … Read more
Carol Ann Duffy wrote ‘The World’s Wife’ in order to scrutinize the representation of both men and women, inspired by her strong feminist views — reconstructing, for example, many of the ‘voiceless women’ from throughout history. As Duffy expressed it; ‘like sand and the oyster it’s a creative irritant. In each poem, I’m trying to … Read more
A poem which deals with the subject of love through strong human emotion is ‘Valentine’ written by Carol-Ann Duffy. The poets attitude to love is unusual as she provides a different perspective on how we can look at it by describing the unconventional and pessimstic side of life. The indepth metaphorical techniques. use of imagery, … Read more
‘Mrs Midas’ is a revisionist version of the King Midas story told from the female perspective: traditionally, this ancient Greek myth was about a man who could turn everything to gold with a touch. This poem explores the sadness Mrs Midas feels in regards to not being able to feel the touch of her husband … Read more
In both “Before You Were Mine” and “Brothers,” Carol Ann Duffy uses descriptions of memory as a means of re-living past family life. Throughout “Before You Were Mine,” Duffy writes about her mother, and imagines her life before motherhood. This poem is designed as Duffy’s recollection of her mother through her mother’s own memories, and … Read more
The poet Carol Anne Duffy presents two different attitudes towards religion in her poems “Prayer” and “Confession.” In “Prayer,” Duffy contemplates how, in the absence of organised religion, comfort can instead be found in ordinary, prosaic occurrences. These usually insignificant experiences instead become a source of consolation for the unknown people discussed in the poem. … Read more
Most of us have a clear perception of what fairy tales are, or what we assume them to be. Over the past century, these tales have been burdened with so many clich’s, such as evil queens’ curses and damsels-in-distress, that we tend to identify them based on the presence of such clich’s. The fairy tale … Read more
Duffy’s poems, Adultery and Disgrace, portray the theme of betrayal in a number of different ways. Both show that betrayal is destructive and deadly to relationships, however, different diverse, including sibilance and oxymorons, are used across the two poems to portray this. It is possible to infer that the two poems are linked as Adultery … Read more
Humans inflict suffering on other humans and when events are forgotten, they are repeated. In the poem “Shooting Stars,” Carol Ann Duffy tells a shocking story of a female prisoner held by Nazis in a concentration camp around the time of the Holocaust. This is a poem in which human suffering is being actively portrayed. … Read more
