Carol Ann Duffy Poetry

Warming Her Pearls

Litany

Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team

Correspondents

Dear Norman

Recognition

Themes

Key Quotes

Plot

Key Quotes

Plot

Key Quotes

Plot

Key Quotes

Plot

Secondary Sources

A stifled Victorian housewife imagines clandestine activities between her and her husband's acquaintance at their house. They are having an affair but only through letters. She imagines several scenarios in the drawing room and the garden where they meet in social occasions and pass one another their secret notes. She is discovering her sexuality bu only in secret. Nothing can ever come of the affair because of the stifling nature of the era.

Form

Dramatic monologue from the perspective of a Victorian housewife, directed towards her illicit lover.
Octaves reflect the restraint of the marriage and the construct of the affair which occurs only through letters rather than sexual liaison.
Free verse, no set meter or rhyme scheme.

Form

Sexual Repression: Their relationship can never be truly realised and so she can never discover true sexual liberation. Her marriage bed is cold and sexless.
Forbidden Love: An affair that can never really come to anything because of the restraints of the time.
Adultery/Betrayal: She has decided to have an affair and break the vows of her marriage - a definite no go of the era.
Disillusionment: She thinks that this affair is giving her power and autonomy but really it's doing nothing of the sort - rather she is just becoming more and more repressed.
Societal Expectation: She cannot leave her marriage because she would be socially condemned.
Appearance vs. Reality - She seems like a submissive housewife but in reality she is sexual and free.

Pressure on Women Quotes
'my hand shall not tremble.'
She has to pre-plan how she will act and react and what she will say in order to keep the facade in tact and her feelings secret. She feels the pressure physically.
'I have kissed
your sweet name on the paper as I knelt by the fire.'
A real yearning conveyed here - a desperation for any sort of physical exchange between them. Raises the question of whether or not it is adultery? Ends the poem with her begging, pleading on her knees as she destroys his letter all because she cannot be found with them for fear of being labelled as promiscuous and adulterous.

Pressure on Women: She has to hide all traces of her sexuality and pretend to be the perfect housewife because that is what's expected of her.
Love, Relationships and Sexuality: Repression of sexuality and sexual drive. She is stuck in her marriage, wanting to be with someone else but their affair can only be very limited.
Identity: Discovering who she really is, the persona is forced to put up a front and pretend to be the perfect housewife - a false identity.
Imagination/Fantasy: The letters are their way of expressing their feelings - it's all imaginary.
Societal Constraints: Divorce isn't an option as it would cause a scandal. She has to live up to expectations as a wife and as a lady.

Love, Relationships and Sexuality
'Passing our letters cautiously between us, our eyes
fixed carefully on legal love, think of me here
on my marriage bed...'
Perfect sound, perfect image, so-called perfect love. Re-enforces the illicit image. It's a place of no passion but the only place that she can go - trapped.
Other themes: Identity; Imagination/Fantasy; Societal Constraints; Appearance v. Reality.
'I read
your dark words and do to myself things
you can only imagine, I hardly knew myself
Illicit, dirty, forbidden.... Shows there is more to the letters than the reader is shown as what we see is decidedly vanilla. She's finding sexual liberation through masturbation but inspired only by words. Discovering real sex alone when it should be a partnership. She is normally controlled and repressed. She;s feeling ultimate self expression but alone, in secret only in words. No one to support and guide her.

Identity
'We
have
the language of stuffed birds, teacups. We don't have
the language of bodies.'
The language of restraint. Metaphor as language is all that they have. Hunting game. Metaphorically it is the stuffy, boring people around them. No tangible passion or interest. Teacups are an everyday item but they show class. Repetition and negation highlights what she is lacking that she wants. No sex, just words. Not much of a relationship.

Imagination/Fantasy
'I have called your name over and over in my head
at the point your fiction brings me to.'
They can only repeat, never move onward or upwards. Conveys her stifled, voiceless nature. An orgasm, Emphasises that it isn't real and it never happened.

Societal Constraints
'When we part,
you kiss my hand, bow from the waist, all passion
patiently restrained.'
Alliterative and oxymoronic - passion is not patient, it is desperate and wanting and wild. Precise alliteration mimics their careful restraint in covering their affair up. false hope in 'all passion', let down by 'patiently restrained'.

Stanzas 1, 2 & 4 are octaves, 3 is a septet.
Now middle-aged captain of the 1964 quiz team. Looks back at the pinnacle of his life with desperation.
Dramatic Monologue, no set meter.

A middle aged man looks back on his time at school which is when he felt that he was at the peak of his life. He knows endless amounts of useless knowledge but that was only able to get him so far. Ultimately he is miserable with little job prospects and a mediocre family life.

Themes

Loss of identity: His life is unfulfilling and he no longer is able to fit in. he doesn't understand the modern day and so attempts to project the old education system on the people around him.
Conformity: He is desperate to do well in school and does so by conforming to the rules and expectations of the teachers. All that this does for him is give him a lack of character, experience and real knowledge.
Disillusionment: He is convinced that conformity and facts will get him everywhere because that is what is expected from him but he never grows beyond that - he thinks that it is enough to let him sail through life.
Childhood: He looks back on his childhood with nostalgia and longing.
Unhappiness: He cannot comprehend why life hasn't turned put the way that he wanted it to and now he is stuck, hating his job and unhappy in his family life.
Time as a destructive force: As time has gone on things have only gone downhill for him and he wants it all back.

Childhood/Youth: Childhood ambitions and expectations have been let down as he realises the reality of adulthood.
Loss: Loss of childhood confidence and optimism. he no longer feels powerful or masculine.
Identity: His identity is lost as all he believes in and is interested in is now irrelevant and redundant.
Imagination/Fantasy: A profound lack of both. He only fantasises about being in the past, never looking for a meaningful future with his own family.

Childhood/Youth
'fizzing hope'
Suggests his hope/success is fleeting and it will fizz out/flatten. Also conveys child-like optimism and energy. At that age hr had a sense of expectation - he isn't foreseeing any problems.
'my lips numb as a two hour snog'
Boyish fantasy - having lips like Jagger. Very optimistic but it is unlikely he ever had one of these as he seems nerdy and inexperienced - also suggests his sexuality was only just emerging.

Loss
'I want it back. The Captain. The one with all the answers.'
Very direct. Up until here the poem had been full of trivial facts and anecdotes but this is real and brutal. Present tense, not in the past anymore. His dreams haven't changed since he was a boy. Simple, childish facts - nothing deep or complex.
'I say to my stale wife
Six hits by Dusty Springfield.'
A clear lack of love and romance. they have lost any spark they may have had before, likely because he thinks that he can get ahead by constantly quizzing her. A pointless, meaningless, arbitrary question. the answer is outdated and irrelevant yet he insists on asking for it anyway.

Identity
'The clever smell of my satchel.'
Expensive and new - likely a reward for his 'achievements'. Personified smell, he associates accessories and the way he looks with potential so he has to look the par. Transferred cathet: he is the 'clever' one but he attributes it to the satchel.
'In class, the white sleeve
of my shirt saluted again and again.'
The shirt - not him. Crisp, clean, conformed: he looks the part and again attributes his identity to his look. Absolute obedience, desperate to please.The only place he was able to flourish in was the flawed education system of the 60's.

Imagination/Fantasy
'How can we know the dancer from the dance?'
A WB Yates poem from 'Among School Children.' In Yates' poem there are meaningful references but his are trivial, fleeting and ridiculous. Yates believed that we are a sum of our words, thoughts and actions and that the speaker shouldn't separate words from their meanings. Ironically, the persona quotes Yates in a manner that goes against Yates' beliefs. He doesn't have the imagination to explore the true implications. To him it's just another fact learned.

Identical stanzas in quatrains reflect her cycle of repetition and her restrictions as a woman.
No set meter or rhyme scheme though lines have similar syllables. Represents how life has ran away from her.
Dramatic monologue - clear speaker. Giving a voice to a miserable, repressed woman who cannot speak out. A housewife, potentially going through menopause.

A middle-aged housewife who is unsatisfied with her marriage and her home life. Time has slipped away from her and she no longer recognises herself in the mirror as she has put on weight and aged badly. Her marriage is failing and her duties as a mother are redundant. She tried to make him happy by fulfilling her domestic duty but it always seems to go wrong.

Pressure on women: She is under pressure from society to look a certain way and act a certain way but she cannot do either.
Ageing: The ageing process has been cruel to her and as she has gotten older she has only gotten unhappier. Her children have also aged and she is now redundant.
Identity: She no longer understands who she is as she has no purpose or meaningful relationships.
Loss: She's lost her identity, purpose, youth, marriage, looks...
Time as a destructive force: Time has only been cruel to her, she hasn't had a fulfilling life.
Disillusionment: She thought that life would give her more.

Youth: She has transferred from bright youth to dull adulthood and life turned out to be a disappointment.
Pressure on Women: She self-inflicts pressure of ageing. Pressure on her to be a mother but she is one without purpose.
Love, Relationships & Sexuality: She has lost her appeal, her relationships with husband & kids are failing.
Materialism: her husband is very clearly rich but money cannot buy happiness.

Youth
'A blond boy swung me up
in his arms and promised me the earth.
He literally swept her off her feet. He is presumably her now husband when they were young. Strong image of joy, youth, vitality and strength which they no longer have. Illusions of the past are dispelled by unfulfilled love. She expected so much more - unfulfilled dreams. Earth is more materialistic that world - he is giving her things not experiences and feelings.
'I strain to remember a time
when my body felt lighter
Years. ...'
She struggles - it's painful. Has to go back a long time and through a lot of pain to remember when she was last happy. Enjambment creates a longer sentence to emphasise how far she has to go back and how long it takes her. Literally she was slimmer and more attractive. Metaphorically she was carefree, less troubles and had nothing/no one to care about. Emphasis is strong, especially after a flow of emotion. It was years and years ago and her suffering is long.

Pressure on Women
'I put powder on,
but it flakes off.
Hiding herself behind a mask. A sense of hope that she can pull herself together adn put on the face she is expected to have. Line continues into next stanza where hope is let down as the powder comes off. A grotesque image of her mask peeling off if swollen, oily skin. Loss of femininity and appeal but massive pressure to keep it.
'In the window,
creamy ladies held a pose
which left me clogged and old.'
Mannequins/real people. Their skin is smooth, glowing, hydrated unlike hers. Irony is that you think of mannequins as well as people who try too hard to look good - fake. Clogged pores, caked in makeup to hide all sense of realness. Stuck. If it is mannequins then she seems even more irrational.

Love, Relationships and Sexuality
'I love him,
through habit, but the proof
has evaporated.'
A similar sense of hope that is then lost. There was love, hope and romantic sentiment but it was lost as she reveal that she only loves him through obligation. Comfort, romance, mutual support and genuine feeling are what 'proof' there once was. Metaphor - all of this has disappeared into thin air without a trace and without either of them noticing.
'Children? I've had three
and don't even know them.'
A sense of been there, done that. No sentiment. She makes them sound like a chore that she has ticked off of her list. A sense of bitterness that they are gone and no longer need her - a redundant mother with nothing to replace her purpose.

Materialism
'Quiche. [...] Shallots. [...] Claret. [...] Cheese. [...]Kleenex.'
These aren't average supermarket products - high class and suggests that he has money. Again shows that he can give her things but not feelings. Money cannot buy happiness. Allusion to ALT's 'The Lady of Shallot'. Makes you realise that money and looks aren't everything. A good relationship is worth so much more than money but it's the only thing that they don't have. Claret is a posh red wine that reflects her blushing.

Victorian/Edwardian, a woman's hand maid. A comment on a society that is close minded and strict. She cannot express herself, giving a voice to an oppressed woman. Duffy often gives voice to people who would only have one behind closed doors.
Dramatic monologue
Quartets, represents her oppression & the restraint she puts herself under.
Trochaic pentameter, sometimes switches to iambic pentameter.

A handmaid looks on at her mistress with love and admiration. She wears her mistress's pearls everyday to warm them before she goes out at night in search of a handsome suitor and the maid does nothing, remaining submissively in her place and admiring from afar.

Sexual Repression: She must hide her true feelings and pretend that she has nothing but subservient feelings towards her mistress.
Forbidden Love: Her love for her mistress is inappropriate for her position but cannot be helped so she must keep it an absolute secret.
Class Division: She is classes below her mistress and is treated as such. They will never be on an equal enough level to have a relationship or even for true feelings ti be expressed.
Societal Expectation: Society dictates that they will never be able to sustain a relationship beyond servant/mistress because it would be socially unacceptable.

Youth: Naivety, a lack of experience, desire for a woman which has made her more childlike/youthful because it is clear that she doesn't know what she is doing.
Pressure on Women: Pressure on the mistress to find a suitor, pressure on the maid to hide her feelings. She couldn't show them even if she wanted to due to the divide in class.
Love, Relationships & Sexuality: She's in love with her mistress and has clearly discovered her sexuality but no relationship can ever come of it. It's a dangerous area a it could jeopardise her entire career and any hope of future jobs.
Identity: Keeps her real identity secret and get on with her job, ever remaining the submissive.
Imagination/Fantasy: Has to keep everything inside of her head. She fantasises constantly about a different type of relationship and about her mistress in a sexual manner.
Societal Constraints: Wouldn't have ever been an acceptable relationship sue to the class divide and the gender of the two women.

Youth
'Slack on my neck, her rope.'
Domination, damnation and enslavement. Trapped by her own forbidden desire and class. Seems very naive as she is obviously playing with fire.

Pressure on Women
'In her looking glass
my red lips part as though I want to speak.'
Shows that appearance is a very important factor to the mistress, ignorance as looks are not all that they seem like with the servant. 'Red lips' is sexual but also seems young and innocent in a Snow White kind of way. She cannot speak, she must remain absolutely silent otherwise she will be in a lot of trouble.

Love, Relationships & Sexuality
'She's beautiful. I dream about her
in my attic bed'
She uses simple language because for her it is that simple. That minor sentence is very powerful as it conveys the true extent of her feelings. She sleeps at the top of the house - the one and only time that she is positioned above the mistress. Shows that when she has the time to imagine her relationship with her mistress becoming a romantic one, she has all of the power and the mistress is unaware.The attic is her place of privacy but it lso shows her poor class.

Imagination/Fantasy
'...picture her dancing
with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent
beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.
A vapid ideal. The mistress is searching for a suitor. Plosive sound, aggressive. She wants this to be happening - dreaming that she is in the mistress's mind. Animalistic, as though she is marking her territory and willing the men away. She's ever present and won't ever stop. Her perfume is decadent, erotic, sophisticated. Imagines allure of the pearls on the skin.

Societal Constraints
'All day I think of her,
resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk
or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself
whilst I work willingly
The mistress's day consists of waiting - she is vapid and purposeless. The only things she has on her mind are the fabrics of her dress. The persona's position is clearly submissive and she doesn't even realise it. She is so in love with the mistress that she does not realise that she has no substance - it's all a fantasy.

Dramatic monologue, teen reaching sexual awareness or a suffocated housewife.
Giving fantasy a voice
Free verse, reflects sexual liberation.

A woman imagines transforming the paper boy into an exotic and handsome man with whom she can have passionate sex. Suggests that she is either a suffocated housewife getting her revenge in her head or a teen who is discovering sexual freedom through imagination.

Sexual Repression: The whole fantasy is inside of her head showing that she has no real life sexual release.
Objectification of Men: 'Pablo' is valued only for his looks and sexual prowess. She talks about him and the dustman as though they are objects for her disposal.
Power of Female Sexuality: She has all of the control and even is able to transform the paper boy into 'Pablo'.
Fantasy vs. Reality: Her fantasy is very separate from reality. The paper boy is not an exotic and sexually proficient man, he is a local kid. Her fantasy skews reality.
Disillusionment: She believes that by projecting her sexual fantasies onto other people she will achieve sexual liberation but really she is only even more repressed as her fantasies have become even less realistic.
Power of Language: She uses language to transform the paper boy from regular person to exotic man.
Transformative Power of Imagination: Her imagination is so powerful that she can make the ordinary and mundane wonderful and exotic.

Pressure on Women: Her fantasies are a response to the pressure put on women. It's a protest of strength against gender roles.
Love, Relationships and Sexuality: Repression of her sexuality, she is sexually repressed, sexual exploration and its power, she doesn't have real sex it's all in the imagination.
Loss: If we go along with the suffocated housewife, this could be a response to a loss of control over her life.
Identity: Has a very strong identity, gives the newspaper boy a new one.
Imagination/Fantasy: Detailed and explicit fantasies about Pablo make her powerful.
Societal Constraints: She cannot simply ravage the newspaper boy or fly off to find a man like Pablo, she must keep it all inside of her head.

Pressure on Women
'In my night
there is no moon, and if it happens that I speak
of stars it's by mistake. Or if it happens
that I mention these things, it's by design.
Possession and control - her night is her creation. No romance, just sex with no strings attached. Celestial imagery is negated as she refuses to stereotype herself. Her sky is devoid of light - empty of anything but black. An expression of loneliness as well as non-romantic sexual expression. She is manipulating her own world. She also could be overcompensating in order to hide a need for genuine romantic feeling.

Love, Relationships & Sexuality
'Pablo says You want for me
to dive again? I want for you to dive.'
She's not looking for anything other than sex from him. She is unable to connect emotionally to him. Revenge is all she has in her head.

Identity
'I shall name him Pablo, because I can.'
She is projecting an alternate identity onto him and he is entirely unaware. This could be because she wants a different identity herself as she is dissatisfied with her own life.

Imagination/Fantasy
'I have turned the newspaper boy into a diver
for pearls.'
Female empowerment - she is in complete control. Phallic connotations, oral sex. Clam shells look like vaginas. He's been transformed from something mundane and ordinary into something enticing and exciting.

Societal Constraints
'Dear Norman'
Portmanteau of 'normal man'. Mundane and ordinary, no sex between them. Suggests that the poem is an epistolary. It could be the paper boy but it is more likely that this is who she is getting revenge on by projecting wild sexual fantasies onto other people.

Loss
'I find this difficult, and then again easy,
as I watch him push his bike off in the rain.
As I watch him push his bike off in the rain
I trace his name upon the window-pane.'
She's upset that he's leaving without real interaction with her. She is attempting to remain detached but the repetition shows that she is upset and trapped. As he walks away, she loses all control over her sexuality and sex life. She shows vulnerability ass she traces his name, she wants him back.

Regular sestets in order to reflect the rigidity of the society and the atmosphere of the occasion.
No set meter or rhyme scheme to reflect the persona's rebellion within a strict, conforming society.
Dramatic monologue - the clear persona is a young girl rebelling against her mother's strict, conforming friends.

A young girl describes a catalogue party in the 1960s. The atmosphere is tense as all of the women strive towards perfection and cannot discuss illness or sex etc. She rebels by recounting a story where a boy in the playground swore at her as an act of rebellion and the story ends as she has her mouth washed out with soap.

Themes

Childhood/Youth: Told from a child's perspective, rebellion, she has an innocent outlook on society.
Pressure on Women: Pressure to remain poised and perfect. there is a lot of judgement among 'friends' so they repress their own ideas and opinions.
Love, Relationships & Sexuality: Tense mother-daughter relationship.Fake relationship between the mother and her friends.
Loss: A loss of autonomy: they aren't in control of who they want to be. Self-imposed loss of autonomy as well as by other women.
Identity: They have sheep-like identities. They are clones of one another and they repress who they really are.
Societal Constraints: Repression, expectation. They don't work, they only 'work' to build a perfect persona.

Repression: The young girl is repressed as she is not allowed to be herself. The mother and her friends are repressed by each other and their standards.
Artifice vs. Reality: Their lives are based on artifice, they pretend that nothing bad happens in the world and so when the persona swears their mini dystopia is shattered.
Pressure on Women: They self-inflict pressure as well as placing it on themselves to appear flawless. The materialism of the era put emphasis and pressure on the women's role in the household in order to ensure that is was en vogue.
Societal Expectation vs Natural Instinct: They are expected to play their roles as housewives, buying in the latest fashions in interior design and dressing their husbands and children. Conversely, the persona's natural instinct is to rebel against these standards.
Identity: The persona is struggling to form an identity when she is being taught to stifle her personality and value men and materials over herself.
Childhood/Rebellion: It's a child's natural instinct to challenge and question their surroundings but she is more mature than this - her rebellion thrills her and she is very deliberate in trying to bring down their ridiculous ideals.

Childhood/Youth
'A boy in the playground, I said, told me
to fuck off; and a thrilled, malicious pause
salted my tongue like an imminent storm.'

Pressure on Women
'stiff-haired wives balanced their red smiles,
passing the catalogue. Pyrex. A tiny ladder
ran up Mrs. Barr's American Tan leg, sly
like a rumour.'

Love, Relationships & Sexuality
'My mother's mute shame. The taste of soap.'

Loss
'eyes, hard
as the bright stones in engagement rings,
and sharp hands poised over biscuits'

Identity
'This was the code I learnt at my mother's knee, pretending
to read, where no one had cancer, or sex, or debts,
and certainly not leukemia, which no one could spell.'

Societal Constraints
'An embarrassing word, broken
to bits, which tensed the air like an accident.'