THE WORLD’S WIFE – GROUPING THE POEMS

In order to make comparisons / contrasts for the examination, it is useful to be clear about
which poems might be grouped in different ways in order to write a clear and coherent
argument. Poems might be grouped by e.g. their source, their themes and ideas, their mood
and tone or their style and form.

Grouping the poems by source.

Mythology The Bible

Thetis
Queen Herod
Mrs. Midas
Mrs. Tiresias Pilate’s Wife
Mrs. Sisyphus Delilah
Medusa Mrs. Lazarus
Circe Salome
Pygmalion’s Bride
Mrs. Icarus
Eurydice Literature / Media
Penelope Little Red-Cap
Demeter
Mrs. Aesop
History Mrs. Faust
Mrs. Darwin Queen Kong
Anne Hathaway Mrs. Quasimodo
The Devil’s Wife
Mrs. Rip Van Winkle
Frau Freud
The Kray Sisters Mrs. Beast
Elvis’s Twin Sister
Pope Joan

Each of these groups may seem to be different, but when we look closely at them we can see
that they all incorporate elements of myth or legend, in one way or another. The historical
figures have become ‘legendary’ because of the way that writers or the media have created an
image of them. Myra Hindley was demonised into ‘the devil’s wife’ by the newspaper
images of her and the constant repetition of her terrible crimes every time there was a
suggestion about her release. The Kray twins became a byword for the ethos of the East End
gang in their own lifetimes, while Elvis Presley is simply referred to as ‘The King’. Darwin
and Freud were the ‘fathers’ of modern evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis respectively.
Anne Hathaway and the ‘second best bed’ have been a subject for speculation by scholars,
while the story of ‘Pope Joan’ has been revived by feminists seeking to argue against the total
male dominance of the catholic church. The figures from literature / media have also
achieved mythological status, becoming a part of modern culture as familiar to most people as
the bible stories or those from Greek and Roman legends.

If we view the whole collection in this way, it becomes clear that Duffy has set out to create a
deliberately different viewpoint; one that sees the originally masculine orientation of these
legends as ripe for ‘de-mythologising’. Her viewpoint is resolutely human, female and
modern and is expressed in a language and style to match.

The poems can also be grouped according to whether the narrator is the wife of a
mythological character or the original female character speaking in a modern tone or the
female equivalent of a male character.
 Wives Female Characters
Mrs. Midas Little Red-Cap
Thetis
Mrs. Tiresias (?)
Delilah
Pilate’s Wife Anne Hathaway
Mrs. Aesop Medusa
The Devil’s Wife
Mrs. Darwin
Circe
Mrs. Sisyphus Salome
Mrs. Faust Eurydice
Mrs. Quasimodo Pope Joan
Penelope
Mrs. Lazarus
Demeter
Pygmalion’s Bride
Mrs. Rip Van Winkle Female Equivalents
Queen Herod
Mrs. Icarus
Queen Kong
Frau Freud The Kray Sisters
Mrs. Beast Elvis’s Twin Sister

In the first group, the very fact that they are known by their husband’s names shows why
Duffy is trying to give them a voice. The traditional dominance of male figures throughout
history has overshadowed the female perspective of things. The conventionally heroic tone
adopted by male writers is turned upside down by the voices given to their wives by Carol
Ann Duffy. The women who narrate the stories see these male figures not as heroic but as
very unimpressive, summed up perfectly by the brief comments of ‘Mrs. Darwin’ and ‘Mrs.
Icarus’.

The second group are far more varied in tone, ranging from the coming-of-age ruthlessness of
‘Little Red-Cap’, through the frightening vindictiveness of ‘Circe’, to the mature joy of
‘Demeter’. They include women who have been victims, those who have been happy without
men, those who have known real love and those who have destroyed men.

At the centre of the collection is a meditation on the relationships between men and women
and the need for women to find a voice. In these poems they have found a number of voices,
each different, yet all the same because they are the voice of the writer. They cover a range of
emotions, too, including anger, desire, loneliness, grief, loss, love, anxiety, and contentment.

The final group show Duffy exploring how a woman might react if she were in the position
occupied by a man. Queen Kong uses very different methods to get her man, from her male
counterpart; Elvis’s twin sister is happy and fulfilled without the need for fame or money; the
Kray sisters use their power to protect women. Only Queen Herod reacts in the same way as
her male original, but for very different reasons, such is the fierce protective love of a mother
for a daughter.
THE WORLD’S WIFE – POETIC TECHNIQUES

Like all poets, Carol Ann Duffy uses a variety of techniques to create the effects she wants in
her poems. The most noticeable of these is her use of colloquial language and slang. Duffy
uses the language that is spoken by her readers and that sounds natural when read aloud. She
does not agree that there is a special type of ‘poetic language’ which is correct. Her poems
here are mainly in the form of monologues spoken by women who have found their voice
through her in the modern world, and this is why, although the characters are distinct, their
voices tend to sound the same. She tends to juxtapose her colloquialisms with metaphors, as
in ‘Little Red-Cap’:
I stitched him up.
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.
Often the slang phrases are used as bathos, when she has built up the public view of the man
in question, as in ‘Eurydice’, when the entrancing power of Orpheus’s art on the natural world
has been described, and the image is destroyed by the single word
Bollocks.
Often they are used for comic effect as in the brief summary of Mrs. Faust’s courtship,
shacked up, split up,
made up, hitched up
or in ‘Frau Freud’, where the piling up of slang terms for the penis to prove how very lacking
in envy she is for that member ends in the word ‘pity’.

Duffy has fun with ‘The Kray Sisters’ where she can use rhyming slang and gangland terms
like ‘manor’ , ‘respect’ and ‘well out of order’ to give an authentic voice to her London
gangster ladies. There are many places where she mixes formal and informal diction to witty
effect, for example in ‘Eurydice’
Just picture my face
when I heard
Ye Gods
a familiar knock-knock-knock at Death’s door.
Him.
Big O.
In addition, she makes use of popular sayings, clichés or proverbs, which add to the effect of a
natural conversational tone, as do the one word sentences which are common in this
collection. The most obvious poem here is ‘Mrs. Aesop’ where the whole text is based
around tales with a moral leading to the clever inversion at the end, where the ‘tables are
turned’ and the moral is used against the inventor. Very often, Duffy uses these maxims to
create double meanings as in ‘Thetis’ where talk of taxidermy leads to
Stuff that.
She also uses them to create comic emphasis by using several synonymous clichés one after
the other, as in ‘Eurydice’
I was dead. Deceased.
I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late.
Past my sell-by date.
They are used so frequently within the poems that they become part of the narrative, as they
are in everyday speech, although we can be sure that Carol Ann Duffy has chosen them very
carefully. Rhythmically the poems work on the cadences of normal speech, just as
Shakespeare’s did, although they use different methods to obtain their effects. Some of the
poems here work mainly on rhyme, like ‘Mrs. Sisyphus’ or ‘Salome’ to create their comic
effects, others, like ‘Thetis’ use the rhymes to create a feel of desperate speed. Other poems
contain very little rhyme, except where a point is being made, as in ‘Mrs. Quasimodo’ when
her husband loses interest and looks at her
with no more love than stone / I should have known.
The rhymes can also be used for emphasis, as in ‘Mrs. Faust’, where Duffy rhymes ‘harms’
with ‘arms’. Other poems use various forms of sound patterning (alliteration, assonance,
onomatopoeia etc.) to create their rhythmic effects. The use of patterns of sounds is much
clearer when the poems are read aloud, because poems work on sound and rhythm in a similar
way to music. Particularly when a poem is free verse, rather than having a conventional form
or rhyme scheme, the metre can rely on sound patterns and on an internal rhythm which is not
always obvious to a reader. For example, in ‘Anne Hathaway’ the first six lines contain a
significant amount of sibilance, a pattern that conveys the sound of sighs and kisses that come
from the ‘second best bed’. The use of assonance in ‘Queen Kong’ where the narrator has
found her man uses ‘ee’ to link the idea of the watcher and the sleeper.
I remember peeping in at his skyscraper room
and seeing him fast asleep.

Duffy uses various poetic forms and metres within the book. Some poems are written in
iambic pentameter form, like ‘Little Red-Cap’, ‘Anne Hathaway’ and ‘The Kray Sisters’, but
others are free verse form and may vary between stanzas. Although the stanza breaks may
seem arbitrary at first, it is clear that Duffy has crafted them carefully, using enjambment
where she wants to link them and end stopped lines where a break is intended. This is shown
in ‘Mrs. Beast’ where the first stanza finishes on ‘The sex’ and the second starts with ‘is
better.’ The two stanzas are separate in that the first deals with the unwisdom of trusting
princes and the second with the superiority of beasts, but the two ideas are linked by their
contrast. It also puts sex at the heart of the relationship! The remaining stanzas finish with
end stopped lines as the subject clearly changes from beast and sex to poker and then from
poker back to the unlucky women who need prayers. She also uses the sonnet form four
times. In ‘Anne Hathaway’ it is a clever parody of Shakespeare and both this and ‘Demeter’
are true love poems. In ‘Frau Freud’ it is an ironic use and in the ‘Bible’ section of ‘The
Devil’s Wife’ it shows a breakdown, not only of a relationship but of sanity.