Havisham & Love Songs in Age

Overall summary of Havisham?

It offers no comfortable or optimistic alternative to the diminishing effects of time.

Unhappiness, Failed Realtionship.

What type of speaker/poem is Havisham?

It is a dramatic monologue that explores the re-imagined lives of both fictional and real women.

Miss Havisham is a character from the novel "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens.

• She was jilted by her deceitful fiancé and continues to wear her wedding dress many years after the rejection.

• She sits amid the remnants of her wedding breakfast for the rest of her life, plotting revenge on all men.

What is the structure of Havisham?

Written in 4 stanzas of even length - adds regularity.

Enjambment & Caesura create quite a disjointed feel, reflecting her mental state.

Line lengths vary with many in iambic pentametre but then spilling over.

‘Beloved sweetheart bastard’

It is an oxymoron, expressing the extremes of emotions that are torturing the speaker.

• The plosive ‘b’ sounds suggest spitting anger and the three words, if spoken aloud, are halting, with percussive hard consonants.

Duffy expresses this through halting, hesitant, jerky phrases, and then rushed ideas that burst out without logic or rationality.

‘dark green pebbles for eyes’

‘ropes on the back of my hands’

The metaphor could represent due to pebbles being hard they might suggest pain in her eyes caused by weeping. This could convey the idea of hardening emotions and growing hatred.

• In the first stanza it is the physical effects of time that we see on Havisham who now has

• These metaphorical images reflect her ongoing bitterness and rage.

Spinster -

• The one-word sentence is an expression of self-hatred and also shame due to loss of status.

• Shows her complete isolation

• This contrasts with Duffy’s publication during the second wave of feminism.

• Ventriloquism is more prominent than Larkin's work.

Animalistic imagery -

‘Slewed mirror’

‘her

The extreme reaction to her abandonment — staying in bed and howling — indicates that Havisham’s mind is unbalanced.

• The onomatopoeic words 'cawing' and 'trembling' depict animalistic imagery, illustrating Havisham's torture and her descent into physical decay.

‘slewed mirror’

‘her, myself, who did this to me?’

• The mirror, described as slewed, suggests that she will not recognise herself as she has completely descended into her 'yellowing' dress.

The enjambment expresses the idea that she is faced with responsibility for what happened to her. She views herself almost as a third party and accepts blame.

• After briefly accepting her part in the situation, she ultimately returns to scornful indignation, once again shifting the blame to her former fiancés

‘Puce curses’ that are ‘sounds not words’

The use of lurid colours here in ‘puce curses’, and example of transferred epithet.

• To convey the image of her flushed face due to the amount of cursin.

‘sounds not worse’

• Words cannot fully express the depth of her pain. Overwhelmed, she struggles to articulate it, evoking animalistic imagery.

‘Some nights better’

‘lost body over me’

‘my fluent tongue in its mouth its ear’

‘bite awake’

Depicitng her erotic feelings

• She refers to him as a detached being, no longer a living, breathing man. It can also signify her divided self, her own ‘lost’ body hovering over her damaged soul.

• he is dreaming of the sexual act with the man who abandoned her

• Expert of knowing what he likes despite like of words she can articulate herself with a physical response.

• Violence born by hatred.

‘Love’s hate behind a white veil’

Reminded cycle of thrill/pain.

• Duffy enjambs the sentence to suggest ongoing emotions.

• This an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms,and is ambiguous — does hate belong to love or is hate synonymous with love? Both apply.

• Havisham can’t break away from the contradictory emotions that are destroying her.

Violent/death imagery -

‘Bang’, ‘stabbed’ -

• This is of course onomatopoeic, representing the shock to her heart and the suddenness of the change in her life.

• contradiction - violent expression.

‘Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon’

• vague description of the ‘corpse’ reveals that she no longer cares if it is specifically her former fiance. This indicates that her caustic acrimony has been generalised towards all ‘males’.

‘Don’t think its only the heart that b-b-breaks’

provides no resolution to the poem as there is no solution to Havisham’s situation, locked as she is in her grief.

• The word ‘b-b-b-breaks’ is onomatopoeic. The plosive ‘b’ could represent her rapid heartbeat

• Note that the poem began with plosive ‘b’s and ends with 'b’s, creating a cyclical structure. It demonstrates that Miss Havisham is imprisoned by an endless cycle of anger.

• Havisham has a broken mind and body she is a broken creature and unfixable.

• She acknowledges it.

What did Michael Woods state about Duffy?

What did Jody Allen-Randolph state?

‘Duffy’s poems explore how time is inevitably cruel and takes things away from us.’ (MW)

‘Failure, loneliness, isolation and emptiness haunt her verse.’