The World 39;s Wife All Poems

[Marquez Feliciano]

The World's Wife is a collection of poetry by Carol Ann Duffy, originally published in the UK in 1999 by both Picador[1] and Anvil Press Poetry[2] and later published in the United States by Faber and Faber in 2000.[3]

Duffy's poems in The World's Wife focus on either well known female figures or fictional counterparts to well known male figures. The themes of the poems focus on the complexities of gender relations, the roles of women, and the often ill treatment of women through fictional, biblical, mythical, and historical contexts. Duffy often also makes modern day references in her poems in order to connect the different settings together into a cohesive collection and also highlight how the ill treatment towards women has endured through all the different contexts and into the modern era.

The World's Wife is Carol Ann Duffy's fifth collection of poetry. Her previous collection, Standing Female Nude, is tied to romantic and amorous themes, while her collection The Other Country takes a more indifferent approach to love; The World's Wife continues this progression in that it critiques male figures, masculinity, and heterosexual love to instead focus on forgotten or neglected female figures.[4]

Duffy speaks of her collections by saying "I wanted to use history and myth and popular culture and elements from cinema and literature, but also to anchor it in a deeply personal soil and make an entertainment, [...] It was fun to juggle around with and there were times when I sat laughing as I was writing"[9]

At the time of its publication, in 1999, Duffy was being "seriously considered for the position"[5] of the United Kingdom's poet laureate, but was ultimately not chosen; she would later become poet laureate in 2009.[10] She stated that her choice to accept the position of poet laureate was "only because, since its inception in the 17th century, no woman had previously held the post."[6]

Duffy's collection focuses on the unheard perspective of female counterparts of famously known male figures; it "gives a voice to the wives of famous and infamous 'great men' of world literature and civilization".[11] She tackles issues surrounding marriage, sex, love, motherhood, etc., i.e. the "typical" roles of women, as detailed through the experiences of famous characters. Through her poems, she is trying to "subvert classical traditions of the male (voyeur) poet and female muse"[4] and instead turns the focus to female characters who are telling their own side of the story. She takes the cliche roles of women and presents it as a "snare in which they are entangled. It is as if they are forced to live a life as stereotype: the bored wife, the neglected wife, or the woman rejected in favour of a younger model."[12] Duffy's poems make a point about "the way expectations and conventions, or the stories we hear and tell, may be erroneous. Such poems ask the reader to pause for a moment, to rethink their lazy assumptions, to look again at what they think they knew"[13]

Antony Rowland argues that her poems are distinct in that they are placed in a setting of "postmodernity" and "lovers who struggle to formulate their alienation amongst modern, urban cityscape" and that this may be why the texts frame love as an "oppressive terror rather than erotic release."[4] While Duffy's poems still "sparkle with wit, intelligence and an impressive lightness of touch, [they also] draw on some weighty emotional experiences: loneliness, jealousy, self-loathing, desire, the fierceness of a mother's love."[9]

Duffy often makes use of dramatic monologue for her collection; "She is famed for her dramatic monologues, which combine compassion, rhythmic verve and an astonishing gift for ventriloquism, and for her tender, lyrical love poems. This collection brings both genres together in the form of masks which, she says, gave her the freedom to explore intensely personal experiences."[9] But she also strays from this form to reflect the subject of the poem when needed. In "Anne Hathaway," Duffy "picks the sonnet [...] she relishes taking on the competition of the biggest literary word-slinger of them all, [Shakespeare], on his own territory."[14] The poem "Mrs. Darwin" also reflects its subject matter in that it uses a journal entry form, reminiscent of Darwin's original journal entries.

Duffy's poetry is also recognizable for its use of rhyme, "not only end-rhymes, but off-rhymes, hidden rhymes, half-rhymes, ghost rhymes, deliberate near-misses that hit the mark."[8] Duffy employs different rhyming techniques to mirror the subject of the poem.

Jeanette Winterson explains this through the example of the poem "The Devil's Wife," she states: "I flew in my chains over the wood where we'd buried / the doll. I know it was me who was there. / I know I carried the spade. I know I was covered in mud. / But I cannot remember how or when or precisely where."

Reviewers from Publishers Weekly, felt that despite Duffy's work being "rife with clever twist,"[16] it is a subject that has been done before by other writers and "one imagines these characters would've come a longer way by now."[16]

The Independent describes Duffy's poetry as one that is "famed for fierce feminism and uncompromising social satire"[9] something that The World's Wife continues, but that it is also "playful and extremely funny look at history, myths and legends through the eyes of the invisible wives."[9]

This unique collection of poems from the Poet Laureate, filled with her characteristic wit, is a feminist classic and a modern take on age-old mythology.

Who? Him. The Husband. Hero. Hunk.
The Boy Next Door. The Paramour. The Je t'adore.

Behind every famous man is a great woman - and from the quick-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the Devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart's shadow to tell her side of the story in this irresistible collection.

Original, subversive, full of imagination and quicksilver wit, The World's Wife is Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy at her beguiling best.

Pan Macmillan acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and their connections to lands, waters and communities.
We pay our respect to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. We honour more than sixty thousand years of storytelling, art and culture.

"Mrs Sisyphus" is a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, which is written from the perspective of Mrs Sisyphus from the Sisyphus story. Sisyphus appears as a cunning character who hid from Death, and his struggles and actions are expressed in detail in the Greek mythology. However, the thoughts and feelings of his wife, Mrs Sisyphus, is not mentioned in the story because she was considered as a subordinate character.

In The World's Wife (1999), Duffy took stories and myths which focus on men, and turned them into poems written from the subordinate female characters in order to inform the public about how women were obscured behind the men.

"Mrs Sisyphus" is included in The World's Wife, which is the reason why the content of the poem shows a feminist side of Duffy, by foregrounding the female character. The poem is also anachronistic because although the characters are taken from ancient Greek mythology, Mrs Sisyphus still uses modern British colloquial language such as "feckin'" or "bollocks". I think Duffy used anachronism in order to make it easier for the audience to build an emotional connection with Mrs Sisyphus by evoking empathy.

I found it very interesting how Duffy explores and expresses the mind of Mrs Sisyphus to the audience so well, by using literary techniques such as masculine rhymes throughout the poem. Ironically, although the main character of this poem is a female, almost all of the lines in the poem contains masculine rhyme in the end, such as "kirk" and "irk". I think this is because Duffy wanted to show the audience about how angry Mrs Sisyphus is because of Sisyphus, who is a workaholic, by repeating short, strong words that are being spitted out by Mrs Sisyphus.

In addition, The meter structure of the poem contributes to help the audience's understanding of Sisyphus' action.
I realised that the structure of the poem has a correlation with Sisyphus' action because the length of the first and the last lines are about the same, whereas the length of each line decreases as it reaches line 16 and starts to increase again. This is similar to Sisyphus slowly pushing up the stone in the beginning, the reaching the peak, and the stone rolling down the other side of the hill, increasing its speed.

I personally think that Duffy also wanted to show how not only Sisyphus but also Mrs Sisyphus was punished by Hades from hiding from death. Although Sisyphus was punished physically, Mrs Sisyphus had a worse emotional and mental stress from watching him working continuously to complete an impossible task. The poem is criticising men for being ignorant and unknowledgeable about what their wives feel and think, by using Mrs Sisyphus as the poetic voice who expresses her disgusted feelings.

Carol Ann Duffy's collection of poems 'The World's Wife challenges gender roles and perceptions of women by retelling famous historical or fictional tales from a woman's perspective. In this paper, I intend to explore power dynamics in the collection and examine how relationships can be empowering, distorting, or limiting to women. I will consider to what extent such empowering or distorting relationships suggest a subverted, disruptive, or limited control, and how either thematic choice interprets the concepts of empowerment. I am interested in how the characters in The World's Wife relate to each other, and my approach toward the selection of the poems reflects that. The selection draws from those poems which engage with the theme of despair particularly, while using a multi-faceted approach: for instance, envy may typify one character's relationship with another, while the other character may despair of the narrator's obtusely unquestioned superiority and naivety. I have also selected some of the lesser-known poems in the collection. These poems explore 'lesser' characters and suggest how the individuals in challenging relationships are perceived from a seemingly 'neutral' angle. In this context, Carol Ann Duffy seems predominantly interested in the role of power and its relationship with identity. The narrator in these poems is generally not lacking in power, but she more often than not seems despondent, envious, dispirited, or oppressed, even when she seems to exude confidence or when the reader's responses reflect these traits in the narrator. While using the terminology specific to these relationships, I will explore how it is both the source and structure of this power which causes the negative emotions. I firmly believe that Carol Ann Duffy's reconstruction of familiar tales allows her to examine the very machinations of those tales, concluding that she situates the influence of women in the community of women as the ultimate arbitrators of the power dynamics illustrating the emotional wars raging between the sexes.

c80f0f1006