HavishamCarol Ann Duffy

Havisham

Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then

I haven’t wished him dead.

Lack of ‘Miss’ in her name highlights lack of any status.

Powerful opening sentence. Oxymoron of affectionate and insulting language.

Use of pronoun rather than real name.

Prayed for it

so hard I’ve dark green pebbles for eyes,

ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with.

Metaphor showing how much she has been crying. Green also represents envy.

Metaphor showing how withered she has become; her veins stick out like ropes.

Spinster. I stink and remember. Whole days

in bed cawing Nooooo at the wall;

Effective one word sentence. Summarises her whole identity.

Play on word ‘think’. Shows how inactive she has been since he left.

Word normally associated with an animal. Highlights her lack of femininity.

Loss of language. Losing the ability to express herself.

the dress

yellowing, trembling if I open the wardrobe;

the slewed mirror, full-length, her, myself, who did this

to me? Puce curses that are sounds not words.

As the wedding dress decays, so does she.

Nervous – her or the dress itself?

‘slewed’ = turned or twisted Pronouns

highlight how she barely recognises herself.

Questioning how she became like this. Use of enjambment highlights this confusion.

Puce = purplish brown

Some nights better, the lost body over me,

my fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear

then down till I suddenly bite awake.

Again the male is not referred to by name. He is simply a body that she misses.

She becomes able to express herself again physically in her dreams.

Imagery becomes more sexually suggestive and then violent as she awakens to the reality of her loss and hatred.

Love’s

hate behind a white veil; a red balloon bursting

in my face. Bang. I stabbed at a wedding-cake.

Oxymoron used again like in opening sentence. Emotional confusion further highlighted by use of enjambment.

Connotations of colour:White = purity, virginity, pale, deathRed = Love, passion, anger, blood

Violent verbs highlight her anger, reinforce how abruptly her happy dream of wedded bliss came to an end.

Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon.

Don’t think it’s only the heart that b-b-b-breaks.

Grotesque image emphasising her desire for revenge.

Romantic idea yet when juxtaposed with previous image it becomes sick and twisted.

Repeated theme of loss of language. Emotions are so confused that she cannot express herself clearly.