1) Personal lives are dysfunctional- romantic relationships are filled
with an excess of nostalgia which obscures reality- WO and FL.
Following on the lines of Rees-Jones who said that “we can see the
nostalgia and disaffection of Phillip Larkin within Duffy’s poetry”, both FL
and WO present personal lives as wholly dysfunctional through an excess
of nostalgia. Fl presents the dysfunctional nature of romanticisation in
personal lives through intangible dream imagery which juxtaposes WO,
which quantifies romance with tangible, physical imagery of numerical
language, presenting dysfunction through clinical indifference. With the
opening line of "Waking, with a dream of first love forming real words", the
paradoxical juxtaposition between 'dream' and 'real' suggests the
oxymoronic nature of love, “waking” firmly plants us (and the love) in
reality yet “Dream" could be a reference to the surrealism that is
associated with the first love- a nostalgic, celestial and utopian quality of
love, which can detrimentally cloud the reality of personal lives. Moreover,
the subversive imagery contained within the enjambement of the speaker
being brought to “a window, naked, to say” their love interest’s name
“again to a garden shaking with light” insinuates a metaphorical barrier
separating the persona’s life from reality, with “the power” of the
glorification of first love enabling her dysfunction. Furthermore, the use of
Edenic Synthanaesia in the “Garden shaking with light", with its
connotations of innate virtue when paired with the biblical allusion of
"Light" being allegorical of the reveal of deep-seated truths, could suggest
the purity of nostalgia but also the temptation to return back to this idyllic
past rather than the inevitable future. This religious imagery highlights the
dysfunctional nature of an abundance of reminiscence in personal lives by
conveying a dominant blindness intrinsic to the innocence of “a child’s
love”, as the lovers feel like the only people on earth (hence the
connotations of Adam and Eve), portraying how their feelings transcended
the material world. Yet, with the polysemy of “naked” presenting a motif of
the speaker at their utmost vulnerability in both the physical sense and
the mental sense, which highly juxtaposes the almost fairy-tale like
conventions of the semantic field of the phantasmagorical, Duffy presents
dysfunction in personal lives. This is by proposing a social diatribe against
rose-tinted idealism in romance by using synaesthesia to imply a
psychological hallucination, as a “garden shaking with light” is
insurmountable for corporeality. “Much of the nostalgia of Duffy’s work is
focused on broken and budding relationships”- Forbes. “A key idea in the
Meantime collection is the idea that the present feels wrong compared to
a remembered (perhaps wrongly remembered) glorious past, the
memories of earlier times tainting the present”-Baty.
Contrastingly, Larkin’s presentation of dysfunction in personal lives isn’t
one of metaphysical transcendence like Duffy. Instead, he utilises a
numerical lexical field to disguise his bitterness surrounding physical
intimacy in his personal life, which with an anecdotal tone created through
the use of offhand enjambement, (inspired by the confessional poetry of
the 1950’s/1960’s like Powell and Sexton) he presents as a universal
, struggle within personal lives. With the use of asyndetic listing in the line
‘And in seven years after that…wrote over four-hundred letters”, Larkin
miserably enumerates the time and money spent on the relationship,
connoted by the monotonous tone, culminating in a sense of
pointlessness, suggesting dysfunction in the mundanity of romance,
rather than the fanciful like Duffy presents in First Love. By reducing the
abstract nature of love to materialistic objects that are ultimately
destroyed, this may be a similar social admonition to Duffy against the
glorification of an immortal, transcendent love in personal lives.
Alternatively, one could gather from the lack of “I” in these lines that he is
distancing himself from what he gifted “the friend in specs” due to a
reluctance to admit the failed trajectory of his relationship; thus he
quantifies personal relationships by loss and cost as, in the materialistic
dogma of 1950’s Britain, he sees it as dysfunctional, perhaps mainly due
to it being emblematic of a wasted effort due to the pressure of having a
“ten-guinea ring” (symbolising marriage) in personal lives in the 1950s.
This is because from the end of world war two until the early 1970’s
marriage rates increased rapidly, and marriage became almost ubiquitous
in personal lives. Perhaps this provides insight as to why he maintains a
deeply sardonic tone in his internal monologue (““She was trying both
times (so I thought) trying not to laugh”) and uses oxymoronic language in
the final line- “unlucky charms perhaps”- to insinuate his ostensible
ambivalence about his failure in his personal life to conform to the
omnipotent marriage pressure, disguising his sense of damaged pride,
paranoia and sense of emasculation by the subject of his infatuation. In
short, Both the anti-romanticist and movement poet Larkin and the
modern imagist Duffy create a semantic field of appearances in contrast
to reality to propagate against extreme idealism in romance, and an
overindulgence in nostalgia, as it inevitably leads to dysfunctional
personal lives in the form of an inherent blindness. In WO, this is through
superficial nonchalance blinding the speaker from the emotional maturity
of healthy communication in their personal life or, in FL, nostalgic reveries
that blind the persona from experiencing actuality in their personal life.
Motion- “Poetry often explores the discrepancy between an ideal life and
the disappointments of lived experience”.
2) Romantic personal lives suffer from a lack of
communication/emotional attachment- for DISGRACE=
displayed through violent and vivid imagery- detrimental
effects of apathy in personal lives, for TIB it’s contrastingly
represented through a quiet, reflective tone evoking the
rhythms of natural speech- Larkin Zoom.
Both Disgrace and TIB present personal lives as lacking meaningful
empathy, but for Duffy the lack of emotional security in personal lives is
portrayed through vast sensory imagery with a more blunt, pungent
writing style whereas for TIB it’s a wholly silent lack of emotional
attachment in the speaker’s personal life. The use of the extended
metaphor of 'Dead flies in a web” in D suggests feelings of entrapment
with an excess of nostalgia which obscures reality- WO and FL.
Following on the lines of Rees-Jones who said that “we can see the
nostalgia and disaffection of Phillip Larkin within Duffy’s poetry”, both FL
and WO present personal lives as wholly dysfunctional through an excess
of nostalgia. Fl presents the dysfunctional nature of romanticisation in
personal lives through intangible dream imagery which juxtaposes WO,
which quantifies romance with tangible, physical imagery of numerical
language, presenting dysfunction through clinical indifference. With the
opening line of "Waking, with a dream of first love forming real words", the
paradoxical juxtaposition between 'dream' and 'real' suggests the
oxymoronic nature of love, “waking” firmly plants us (and the love) in
reality yet “Dream" could be a reference to the surrealism that is
associated with the first love- a nostalgic, celestial and utopian quality of
love, which can detrimentally cloud the reality of personal lives. Moreover,
the subversive imagery contained within the enjambement of the speaker
being brought to “a window, naked, to say” their love interest’s name
“again to a garden shaking with light” insinuates a metaphorical barrier
separating the persona’s life from reality, with “the power” of the
glorification of first love enabling her dysfunction. Furthermore, the use of
Edenic Synthanaesia in the “Garden shaking with light", with its
connotations of innate virtue when paired with the biblical allusion of
"Light" being allegorical of the reveal of deep-seated truths, could suggest
the purity of nostalgia but also the temptation to return back to this idyllic
past rather than the inevitable future. This religious imagery highlights the
dysfunctional nature of an abundance of reminiscence in personal lives by
conveying a dominant blindness intrinsic to the innocence of “a child’s
love”, as the lovers feel like the only people on earth (hence the
connotations of Adam and Eve), portraying how their feelings transcended
the material world. Yet, with the polysemy of “naked” presenting a motif of
the speaker at their utmost vulnerability in both the physical sense and
the mental sense, which highly juxtaposes the almost fairy-tale like
conventions of the semantic field of the phantasmagorical, Duffy presents
dysfunction in personal lives. This is by proposing a social diatribe against
rose-tinted idealism in romance by using synaesthesia to imply a
psychological hallucination, as a “garden shaking with light” is
insurmountable for corporeality. “Much of the nostalgia of Duffy’s work is
focused on broken and budding relationships”- Forbes. “A key idea in the
Meantime collection is the idea that the present feels wrong compared to
a remembered (perhaps wrongly remembered) glorious past, the
memories of earlier times tainting the present”-Baty.
Contrastingly, Larkin’s presentation of dysfunction in personal lives isn’t
one of metaphysical transcendence like Duffy. Instead, he utilises a
numerical lexical field to disguise his bitterness surrounding physical
intimacy in his personal life, which with an anecdotal tone created through
the use of offhand enjambement, (inspired by the confessional poetry of
the 1950’s/1960’s like Powell and Sexton) he presents as a universal
, struggle within personal lives. With the use of asyndetic listing in the line
‘And in seven years after that…wrote over four-hundred letters”, Larkin
miserably enumerates the time and money spent on the relationship,
connoted by the monotonous tone, culminating in a sense of
pointlessness, suggesting dysfunction in the mundanity of romance,
rather than the fanciful like Duffy presents in First Love. By reducing the
abstract nature of love to materialistic objects that are ultimately
destroyed, this may be a similar social admonition to Duffy against the
glorification of an immortal, transcendent love in personal lives.
Alternatively, one could gather from the lack of “I” in these lines that he is
distancing himself from what he gifted “the friend in specs” due to a
reluctance to admit the failed trajectory of his relationship; thus he
quantifies personal relationships by loss and cost as, in the materialistic
dogma of 1950’s Britain, he sees it as dysfunctional, perhaps mainly due
to it being emblematic of a wasted effort due to the pressure of having a
“ten-guinea ring” (symbolising marriage) in personal lives in the 1950s.
This is because from the end of world war two until the early 1970’s
marriage rates increased rapidly, and marriage became almost ubiquitous
in personal lives. Perhaps this provides insight as to why he maintains a
deeply sardonic tone in his internal monologue (““She was trying both
times (so I thought) trying not to laugh”) and uses oxymoronic language in
the final line- “unlucky charms perhaps”- to insinuate his ostensible
ambivalence about his failure in his personal life to conform to the
omnipotent marriage pressure, disguising his sense of damaged pride,
paranoia and sense of emasculation by the subject of his infatuation. In
short, Both the anti-romanticist and movement poet Larkin and the
modern imagist Duffy create a semantic field of appearances in contrast
to reality to propagate against extreme idealism in romance, and an
overindulgence in nostalgia, as it inevitably leads to dysfunctional
personal lives in the form of an inherent blindness. In WO, this is through
superficial nonchalance blinding the speaker from the emotional maturity
of healthy communication in their personal life or, in FL, nostalgic reveries
that blind the persona from experiencing actuality in their personal life.
Motion- “Poetry often explores the discrepancy between an ideal life and
the disappointments of lived experience”.
2) Romantic personal lives suffer from a lack of
communication/emotional attachment- for DISGRACE=
displayed through violent and vivid imagery- detrimental
effects of apathy in personal lives, for TIB it’s contrastingly
represented through a quiet, reflective tone evoking the
rhythms of natural speech- Larkin Zoom.
Both Disgrace and TIB present personal lives as lacking meaningful
empathy, but for Duffy the lack of emotional security in personal lives is
portrayed through vast sensory imagery with a more blunt, pungent
writing style whereas for TIB it’s a wholly silent lack of emotional
attachment in the speaker’s personal life. The use of the extended
metaphor of 'Dead flies in a web” in D suggests feelings of entrapment
