Carol Ann Duffy uses her poems to discuss her views on current situations or past historical events. She is able to take such stories and transform them into poetry, in order to create understanding to her readers and also awareness. Duffy writes her poems in such a way because she wants to give the people in her poetry a voice which they never were given before. She writes a lot of poetry about the wives behind powerful men, whose opinions were never shown before. The poems I am going to be discussing have both been taken from one of her booklets ‘Standing Female Nude’, in which I will use to discuss the way Duffy uses her characters to put across her own ideas. I will then be comparing these characters in these poems with another poet called Sheenagh Pugh, another female poet who shares the same views as Duffy.
The first poem I will discuss is ‘Standing Female Nude’. This poem discusses the issues of women not voicing their intelligence to men, the main theme in this poem being that the artist Georges Braque, the artist who developed cubism with Picasso, thinks that he is above her. The model is not asked for her opinion on the art and is constantly told to be quiet, her identity not being revealed to us as if it is not important. Duffy wrote this poem to show how women feel being treated in such an awful way and also, she is a strong feminist and believed that the model deserved to have her voice heard. The poem I will be using as comparison is ‘Senesino/Farinelli’. This poem is about two famous opera singers named Senesino and Farinelli, both men being eunuchs.
The poem starts with the model telling the reader that she is posing naked for the painting in which Georges is creating, ‘They call it Art’. The model mocks Georges and the art because we see that she doesn’t view his work with any interest. The ‘Art’ that she creates is very much different to Georges as her profession is prostitution, a profession that is not respected by the higher class. We see that her opinion again is not asked by others because ‘they’ told her that it was ‘art’. This shows that she is expected to respect what others tell her because she is of a lower class to them. This links in with the opera singers, Senesino and Farinelli because similarly, their art is only respected when it is being performed on stage and nowhere else, ‘any artist is less than a man’. This shows that in both poems, society only respects the art when they receive something out of it; entertainment, otherwise, it is just ignored.
The model talks about how the ‘studio is cold’ which shows that she is being kept in cold conditioned while she is being painted, which is seen as the best thing to do for the art. This shows that she is undervalued in society and reflects how they treat her, which is much like with the opera singers. Farinelli went to a party but the host told him to ‘Get out…none but gentlemen come here’. This shows that they also have no value in society when they are not performing on stage in the theatre which again reiterates the point that both poems create showing how the people in the higher classes treat people lower than them with no respect.
The model seems to be a higher class escort when the reader sees her dismiss Georges, but she also mocks the upper class. She imagines ‘the Queen of England gazing’ at her painting when it is finished and the model finds it funny because she will gaze upon the painting with interest unlike she would if she saw her on the streets, mocking the monarchy. The model is a realist and she knows where she stands in society, which in comparison we see that Senesino is too. He has a realist view on life and understands the difference in classes and where not to cross them, ‘don’t enter their lives’. This shows that both of them are able to keep their feet on the ground and not get too big-headed thinking that the upper class will respect the, keeping the us and them culture in their minds.
The model’s realist view knows that Georges doesn’t really respect her and is just using her for the art. We can see that she doesn’t have any respect for him either or his art form, ‘little man’. Georges knows that she is cheap so in such ways, he is prostituting his art. The fact that she doesn’t respect his art may show that she doesn’t understand that type of art form. In contrast to the model, both opera singers are belittled similarly to how Georges is belittled, but unlike him, they are eunuchs. Senesino tells Farinelli not to get involved with the higher classes because he knows that he won’t get anything out of it and he will just be seen as an ‘over-dressed little man’.
Both of these poems tell the reader about the society that these people live in. In ‘Sanding Female Nude’, we can see that with her being a woman and in the profession of a prostitute, she has no respect in her society from anyone because they all think that they are above her. Similarly in ‘Senesino/Farinelli’, we see that Senesino has been in the profession long enough to know that the people in the higher class only want to see them because they provide them with entertainment, otherwise, they don’t want to involve themselves with them. Duffy and Pugh both show in these poems that the stereotypical view on society shows that you have to be wealthy and in a higher class in order to be able to pass in society. Both of these poems discuss the themes of society
The next poem that I’m going to discuss is ‘Education for Leisure’. This poem explores the mind of a person who is planning to commit a murder. The poem stereotypically makes you feel like the person is the voice of a teenaged boy who has left school and is on unemployment benefit. We see that this person feels undervalued in society and this poem describes how they feel murdering someone will get them discovered and the recognition that they feel they deserve.
The poem I will use to compare with this is ‘She Was Nineteen, and She Was Bored’. This poem is about a woman who similarly like the model in ‘Standing Female Nude’, feels as if her voice is not being heard. This women works as a kitchen maid, showing again she is of a lower class in society. Unlike the model, this woman takes action and takes control of where she stands in society.
The poem starts with the man talking about how he has ‘had enough of being ignored’. This shows that he craves attention and just wants to gain something better in his life. From the title we could say that he seems to have not had a very good education and possibly now he is teaching himself, he is bored with the way his life is. This associates with the woman because she is also ‘bored of being a kitchenmaid’. She also wants a better life and we can see that is reiterates the point from the other poems, showing that you need to be in a higher class in order to make it anywhere and gain a better lifestyle.
The man tells the reader that he is going to ‘play God’. He wants to take control and that means even murdering a life in order to get the control that he wants. The man kills a fly and also flushes a goldfish down the toilet in order to feel some thrill towards acting like ‘God’. The woman similarly is acting like God because people ‘lived or died at her option’. She became the wardress and she finally gained the control that she wanted over people, something that the man wanted to achieve. Unfortunately, we see that the woman has become overwhelmed with her power of control and she took it slightly too far.
The man wanted to be recognised and the only way he thought he could was to kill something, ‘I am going to kill something. Anything’ He has no reason to kill anything, not that the reader can tell. From the title, we may be able to see that education has failed the man and he is looking for some kind of revenge. This was set in the 1980’s so maybe this person has a mental illness that is unrecognised to the public, causing him to act the way he does. The woman has a reason in her mind to kill people, ‘She was a failure’. The insults in which she received may imply the reason for her behaviour, looking for some revenge. This shows that really both of these people want to kill people in order to gain some sort of satisfaction to make them feel better about themselves.
Both of these people are not known in the public eye, they are both in a lower society and are unknown. The man goes down to the unemployment centre, seeming to sign up but he tells us that they ‘don’t appreciate (his) autograph’. This shows that at the time, people couldn’t understand that he may have had a mental illness so they didn’t except him onto the unemployment list, showing him that he was undervalued. This would have made the man more angry and made him feel even more unaccepted, adding more of a reason for him to want to take revenge on society. The woman also felt like she being ignored by society and she before she was a ‘nobody’. This would have made her feel undervalued, again causing a reason for her to want to also take revenge on society.
Both of these poems again tell the reader about the society that these people live in. These poems both show the effect of what happens when people feel ignored in society. We see that the man in ‘Education for Leisure’ feels let down by his society and he feels undervalued, similarly to how the woman feels in ‘She Was Nineteen, and She Was Bored’. The first two poems are able to show how people deal with not being accepted into a higher class in society and how they seem to keep a realist view on life, showing that they have accepted who they are. The last two poems discuss how both of the people also feel undervalued in society but how they want to take action against this. We see that the woman is killed for the crimes which she has committed, whilst we never know what happened to the man because it stops just as he touches his murder victim. Both Pugh and Duffy are able to show in their poems how people view their society at the time in which they were set and how they deal with it, whilst adding their own opinion on how they also view society.