Rapture

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the poems are rich, beautiful and heart-rending in their exploration of the deepest recesses of human emotion, both joy and pain. " She is a truly brilliant modern poet who has stretched our imaginations by putting the whole range of human experiences into lines that capture the emotions perfectly.” The poem is a traditional sonnet comprising fourteen lines, and following loosely an ABAB CDCD EFEFGG rhyming pattern. It also follows the metrical rhythm usually associated with sonnets, iambic pentameter, that is five metrical feet or iambs per line, where a iamb is one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable. Although time is the enemy of love, the emotion of love and the moments spent with a lover exist outside the limits of time.

Carol Ann Duffy, one of the most significant names in contemporary British poetry, has achieved that rare feat of both critical and commercial success. Her work is read and enjoyed equally by critics, academics and lay readers, and it features regularly on both university syllabuses and school syllabuses. Some critics have accused Duffy of being too populist, but on the whole her work is highly acclaimed for being both literary and accessible, and she is regarded as one of Britain’s most well-loved and successful contemporary poets. The voice is that of a first person speaker, we can assume the poet, using the pronoun “I”, and referring to “we” of the relationship. From lines ten to twelve, time remains a present theme alongside allusions to nature, bringing traditional romantic imagery to the forefront of the poem. The narrator uses interesting language in the first line of this stanza of the poem. They personify their thoughts and in doing so create a powerful piece of imagery. The fact that it refers to their thoughts as “uninvited” suggests that they are powerless to control how they feel and wouldn’t want to feel that way. This line definitely suggests that the narrator can’t get the object of their affection out of their head. This is quite skilfully done as the narrator uses the word assonance to prove their point but also uses assonance in the line. Clever stuff! I think what is trying to be said here is that they try and break with the norm to attain bliss, but up until this point it doesn’t seem to have been working!Although Duffy typically subverts traditional expectations of relationships and romance in her poems, 'Hour' follows a more traditional form and structure. The poem itself has an intimate nature, as it represents a moment taken from Duffy's own life. However, the use of a traditional form indicates that Duffy is aware that the experience she is describing is essentially universal. An extended rhapsody on a love affair, ushering the reader from first spark to full flame to final, messy Clearly, there is a massive transformation and the tone of the poem has changed dramatically. It is at this point in the poem we start to understand why it is called the rapture. Speaking of which note once again the reference to heaven. I want to be both the lover and her beloved. I want to be the longing and the clamoring, lusty, romantic language. Desire’s tendrils spiral coyly, and they will climb on a mop of floppy hyacinth—or on a dead vine. One is wrapped around my finger, as I crouch before “Lady Margaret”, Passiflora (passion flower) in my garden. I’m wrapped around Duffy’s finger, body, soul, and poet-mind. The second line is full of innuendo. The narrator goes to “bed” which you could associate with sex and then says that they dreamed of the other person “hard” which may not be an innuendo but the fact that it is used twice for emphasis suggests that it is indeed an innuendo! The third line refers to the way that the narrator’s love interest’s name sounds. The description is very melodramatic and over the top, this emphasizes the passion they feel. In closing the stanza they claim that the way they are feeling is like a spell. This once again suggests that it is beyond their control and that it is something that is being done unto them rather than an experience they are necessarily enjoying.

If love, as Padel suggests, has always been at the centre of her poetry, this is not only romantic and sexual, it is also both daughterly and intensely maternal. Myth and fairy-tale are vital to her imagining of the world, but they are given contemporary voices in her poems. The combination of tenderness and toughness, humour and lyricism, unconventional attitudes and conventional forms, has won her a very wide audience of readers and listeners. As fellow-poet Sean O’Brien wrote: ‘Poetry, like love, depends on a kind of recognition. So often with Duffy does the reader say, “Yes, that’s it exactly,” that she could well become the representative poet of the present day.’ There was speculation that she might become Poet Laureate upon the death of Ted Hughes in 1999, but the post went to Andrew Motion. She declared that the position was worthwhile as it was ‘good to have someone who is prepared to say that poetry is part of our national life’, and in an interview in The Independent predicted that poetry would ‘become more important and take a larger part in our lives in the next century’. Finally appointed Poet Laureate in 2009, she was the first female and the first Scottish Poet Laureate in the role’s 400 year history.

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Some of Duffy's phrases will not let you be. Living our ordinary lives without passion, we are "queuing for death"; speaking ordinary phrases without telling the whole truth means that "words, / are the cauls of the unsaid". The grammar and the thematic structures of Duffy's poems can seem compacted, as in the opening line of "Rapture": "Thought of by you all day, I think of you." But if you sometimes have to work hard to unknot Duffy's sense, the unravelling rewards. If sexual desire were anything but insatiable, it would be something else. If experience couldn’t let language in, there’d be no poem, only rain. From “Bridgewater Hall”: