Web references for Havisham by Carol Ann Duffy for dedicated students
Web references for Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy for dedicated students
Web references for Before You Were Mine by Carol Ann Duffy for dedicated students
Web references for Stealing by Carol Ann Duffy for dedicated students
If you find any other useful sites on these poems post them in a comment for everyone to share.
Just wanted to be the only one posting on this page hehe...
ReplyDeleteHavisham
The vicious lady is plotting her global revenge on all of malekind (see what I did there).
Having your hopes shattered has become as common as buying a pink poodle/ or perhaps playing COD (the brain washing video game, not the fish). For her to hold such grudge over such a long period of time can only hint to the fact that she may - in a twisted fate of irony - take comfort in playing the 'victim'. Otherwise how would a women, rich as she - this again hinting to the possibility of bountiful suitors lined at her feet in her youth - take pleasure in the making out with a corpse on a long 'slow honeymoon'.
Anne Hathaway
Anne Hathaway was nine years older than her husband... this can tell us that:
Either love really do exist and penguins truly can fly (what do you know)
Or that A. Hathaway dug her claws into the rising star that was Shakespeare and managed to get pregnant in order to entangle him (as a poet is true to his virtues)
Taking the latter route, from the poem, we may arrive to the conclusion of 'second best bed' meaning that the first had been ripped from under him. By getting pregnant, A. Hathaway stopped Shakespeare from marring another woman - whose bed may now be the 'best' bed; that of the loyal mistress - yet she never stopped him from visiting the other.
'Bed' could be taken as a metaphor or the real thing; both pointing in the same direction.
Before you were mine
http://www.helium.com/items/847903-poetry-analysis-before-you-were-mine-by-carol-ann-duffy?page=2... The latter link is broken (just thought you should know ;)
Stealing
There is a strong sense of 'Dramatic monologue' coming from this poem... We are almost pushed to the conclusion that this is a 'hard' character; a delinquent that should be thrown away into a cellar half way across the arctic somewhere. Yet the speaker points out the only reason he 'wanted' the snowman: simply because it had 'a mind as cold as the slice of ice within' his 'own brain.' This may hint to the speaker being harsh and heartless; though from past experience I would have to say that 'heartless' persons don't refer to themselves as that; in fact they would go to odd lengths to camouflage their real characteristic.
This only emphasise the point that the speaker has had a life so 'tough' that he now stand 'sick of the world'; his only escape from such a world being 'joy-rides' as within his mind he'd be 'Better off dead than giving in' to that world that has let him down.