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“Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife explores the...”

written by Janet Lewison on 04/08/2009

Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife explores the finitude and silences of romantic love narratives. The Collection's glittering monologues testify to the pathos and irony of 'enduring' affection, particularly marital affection, which historically and culturally have dispossessed women of their identity and speech. The reader's journey through Duffy's World's Wife is witty, uncomfortable and liberating. And then finally, just when we have become acclimatised to a 'worldly' acceptance of love unmasked and dissembled, Duffy offers the reader a profoundly intimate gift. This gift celebrates once more what we thought was irretrievably lost; the resurrection of a truly loving communion. Thus The World's Wife ends with her sonnet to 'Demeter'; possibly I feel her most brilliant poem, a poem which significantly celebrates an emotionally redemptive connection between two mother and daughter.



The poem revisits the myth of the Greek Goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone and explores the isolating privacy of mourning. The original story centres on Demeter's loss of her daughter Persephone to Hades, the King of the Underworld. Demeter in her abject maternal grief and anger plunges the world into everlasting winter until her daughter is returned to her for part of the calendar year by Hades after pressure from other Gods.



Duffy takes the sonnet, a rigorous and formally constraining poetic form associated with love, to explore the tension between loss and resurrection; between abject despair and the consummate revelation of love returned.