Carol Ann Duffy Essays

12th Grade

Carol Ann Duffy: Poems

‘Mrs Midas’ is a revisionist version of the King Midas story told from the female perspective: traditionally, this ancient Greek myth was about a man who could turn everything to gold with a touch. This poem explores the sadness Mrs Midas feels...

12th Grade

Carol Ann Duffy: Poems

Queen Herod is taken from Duffy’s The World’s Wife, a collection which inverts gender roles to celebrate female characters and display the injustice of men’s generalizations. This poem inverts the gender roles in the biblical story of the arrival...

11th Grade

Carol Ann Duffy: Poems

In both "Before You Were Mine" and "Brothers," Carol Ann Duffy uses descriptions of memory as a means of re-living past family life. Throughout "Before You Were Mine," Duffy writes about her mother, and imagines her life before motherhood. This...

11th Grade

Carol Ann Duffy: Poems

Duffy explores ideas, thoughts and feelings about love in Valentine and Havisham by commenting on societal expectations of the outcomes and portraying love as unstable, dangerous and likely to cause hurt.

Firstly, Duffy explores the expectation of...

College

Carol Ann Duffy: Poems

In the poem ‘The Map Woman’, Carol Ann Duffy uses the extended metaphor of a map being printed on a woman’s body to explore ideas surrounding hometowns, childhood and nostalgia. This is immediately introduced in the first line where the reader...

12th Grade

Carol Ann Duffy: Poems

In ‘The Crown’, Carol Ann Duffy explores the prestige and catalogue of duties entailed by queenship through an extended description of a crown. Whilst it cannot be denied that monarchy in the poem is presented as deserving of both awe and respect,...

10th Grade

Carol Ann Duffy: Poems

Carol Ann Duffy’s sinister dramatic monologue, Havisham, is a skillful interpretation of one of literature’s most infamous women. Throughout the text, Duffy deals with the idea of conflict – both in Havisham’s relationship with men and with...