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WORK - Coggle Diagram

- - - - The second and third stanzas cover agriculture and medieval life, looking at tasks that respectively touch on those topics.
      - The use of sibilance across ‘sewed seeds’ further speeds up the meter of the poem, the smooth sound similarly propelling Work forward and on to the next task.
      - Asyndeton is used again in both of these stanzas, ‘watered, threshed, scythed… harder, second job in the alehouse, food int he larder, food on the table’, to present the never-ending task list that the woman completes. Duffy, although only focusing on one woman, is actually taking snapshots of women throughout time and around the world, different women all contributing to the endless stream of tasks completed by women.
      - The harsh internal rhyme between ‘harder’ and ‘larder’ suggests that in order to produce ‘food on the table’, the women must continuously work longer and harder hours. There is an ever-increasing demand, shown by the expanding number, ‘feed four… feeding ten’, that must be fulfilled by the tireless woman. Duffy is displaying how women are overworked as providers and caregivers, the role of nurturing the many falling to them.
  - - - These stanzas focus on the process of industrialization and urbanization, both using their respective semantics within words such as ‘oil, metal, noise, machines’ and ‘high-rise flats. Cities grew’. Time is passing, but the demand on women is not letting up. Asyndeton is again used to display this idea, task after task being assigned to the woman of the poem.
      - Between these stanzas, the number of people she is caring for moves from ‘Fifty’ to ‘a thousand more’, women providing for ever-increasing numbers.
      - The use of a caesura between ‘To feed more, more’ creates a slight metrical break. This can be understood as a momentary pause, the woman drawing in a breath before carrying on with her task list. The repetition of ‘more’ further this suggestion, the break being only momentary before yet ‘more’ is added to the equation.