Continuing her use of hyperbole, Duffy then personifies the female voice. It has incredible power, ‘stomped through the city’ and ‘shaking the bells’ as she goes. Women’s voices have become all-powerful, combing with nature to overwhelm the world. The female voice gains the power of the ‘sea’, able to rebel against the ‘moon’ and send it ‘away’. The rejection of the moon’s pull on the sea could be emblematic of the female voice breaking out of the constraints of the patriarchy, and speaking out against suppression.
Duffy uses harsh consonance again in the eighth stanza, ‘prayers of the priest’. At this point in the poem, the voice has become so loud that it is encompassing a whole world of rage. The plosive ‘p’ across this phrase cuts through the narrative, reflecting this rage through the sound of the words.
Asyndeton closes the poem, event after event overwhelming the woman. Although she gets ‘loud, loud, louder’, representing the gaining of power within the female voice, the poem ends on ‘the News’. The finality of this image could display how the ‘News’ is yet more powerful. Even after all the female voice has done, the horrors of the world are still too great. Duffy ends the poem on a chilling image, revealing how the ‘News’ can overwhelm everything that has come before.
It is interesting how the poem is cyclic, with the epigraph, and the final line both referencing the horrors of the news. This could suggest that there is always a worse event going on in the world. We just wait for the News to realize and send us the terrible story. Duffy’s poem ends with a gloomy tone, the female voice still not rising above the drowning noise of how terrible our world has become.