Preview

Duffy and Pugh: Social Attitudes in Their Poems

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1665 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Duffy and Pugh: Social Attitudes in Their Poems
What connections have you found between the ways Duffy and Pugh present social attitudes in their poems?
Plan
Intro: Duffy and Pugh present social attitudes in different ways... Duffy empowers women, Pugh has negative views on aging.
Core Poem 1: standing female nude is about a woman who works for a poor wage for something which is out of her comfort zone… hello is about aging and how you get forgotten about. Isolation, powerless.
Core Poem 2: Mrs midas is about the consequences of midas's actions and how they have affected his wife. An older woman about a younger man she lusts after some parts of it she could be mothering others she seems like a predator. Corruption, wrong choices.
The poets Duffy and Pugh present social attitudes in different ways. Duffy empowers women and gives them a voice whereas Pugh has a negative view on aging and who you are no longer innocent as you get older.
Firstly, the poem “standing female nude” by Duffy which is about a woman whom is getting painted for a “few francs”. She isn’t happy about this she considers herself as a “river whore” because she is practically selling her body to get painted and it is argued that she also gets it paid for sex this may be argued because she says she “dances around bars” which could be consider as an analogy for being a prostitute. The poem “Man getting hammered: between frames” by Sheenagh Pugh is a deliberation on old age, loneliness and death. It is about an old lonely man whom is saying hello to strangers but isn’t getting a reply it is seems he is ignored because he is old and no-one takes any notice of him. The poem “standing female nude” conveys ideas that the person she is getting painted by “drains” her this illuminates the fact that the painter is sucking the life out of her because she is doing something that she is not keen on doing. It says “sucks the colour” this links back to the act that he is painting her and it gives us more of an incline of what the poem is about. The

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    At the beginning of each story, O'Connor presents each character as learned, conceited, and self-righteous. Julian has just graduated from college, which is a big achievement, considering that her mother did it all by herself. Julian is an aspiring writer who, for now, sells typewriters and lives with his mother. He thinks of himself as very intelligent. In fact, he often draws himself "into the inner compartment of his mind . . . the only place where he [feels] free of the general idiocy of his fellows." In the same way, Hulga is a 32-year old woman who holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and currently lives with her mother. She, like Julian, also thinks of herself as superior to others. She thinks…

    • 708 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The poem begins without indicating who these people are or what has happened to them in the past, references to “he” and “her”. Throughout the poem the central character is never given a name. The significance of this is the wife is an anonymous woman due to the lack of a permanent place to live. No one knows her name. She could perhaps represent others.…

    • 347 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Cousin Kate

    • 486 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The two poems that are being compared are cousin Kate and the seduction. Cousin Kate was written in the 1900 and the seduction was written in 1980. Both of the poems were written by different authors. In both of the poems, both women get seduced by men and they just get rejected by both men too. They must bare the consequences of their mistakes and the men that had took advantage of them were free to carry on with their lives. Both of the poems are from different periods and make exploitation more cruel by using innocent and vulnerable girls.…

    • 486 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Just Whatever

    • 1983 Words
    • 8 Pages

    How accurately do the lines of poetry below reflect gender roles for European men and women in the late nineteenth century?…

    • 1983 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The identity and voice of the central figure within a poem influences the readers view of the world. The symbolic depiction of societal roles from the point of view of a central characters experience articulates social and cultural traditions, allowing the poet to endorse or critique the naturalized values of his or her culture. In her two sonnets, In the Park, and Suburban Sonnet: Boxing Day, the Australian poet Gwen Harwood uses the generic conventions of poetry to construct a central persona who, through their voice, conveys the social expectations of women in 1950s suburban Australia. Both sonnets centre on a mother dealing with the everyday challenges of motherhood and through the use of the poetic techniques of the sonnet form, imagery, irony, tone and symbolism, socially define the mother figure in Australian Culture. The development of the womans identity empowers the feminine voice of the poem to portray cultural values in a way that positions the reader to develop an understanding of the poets world and interrogate Australias patriarchal societys marginalization of motherhood.…

    • 1083 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The poem can be seen by some as a allegory to some women’s experience in the workplace in the past few years when they were harassed by their male coworkers. The poem is in a way a complaint of a workplace where in which a women in subjected to many things that she must take in stride and smile at the injustices. The speaker hates it but knows that going someplace else won’t guarantee shell never have to face this treatment again. This piece is a poem that can be understood by any women who had unpleasant experiences in the office and wanted to get away from it and yet…

    • 393 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    How do the Poets James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy Present the Pain of Love in their Poems ‘In Paris with You’ and ‘Quickdraw’?…

    • 853 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Comparison Essay

    • 449 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Both poems have very different points of view, yet the stories are closely tied together. Each author has experienced similar treatment being an outsider. They have both had to deal with hatred and discrimination, and have had to adapt to…

    • 449 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Medusa’ and Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ are two entirely different poems in many respects. Written in entirely different eras, some would say that they are as opposite as poetry could be. However, their central characters have some remarkable similarities that strike a chord with the reader and represent a common theme.…

    • 2124 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    heyo potao

    • 1486 Words
    • 8 Pages

    How accurately do the lines of poetry above reflect gender roles for European men and women in the late nineteenth century?…

    • 1486 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Each of the poets clearly had different backgrounds growing up by the way the write their poems. Grace Nichols (the writer of ‘Praise song for my Mother’) comes from Guyana and had ‘lots of freedom as she was growing up’ (quoted from a BBC interview) and had an extremely large family, which was very common in Guyana. Nichols described her childhood as ‘magical’ so had a lot of influence over her writing. Vernon Scannell was in WW1, so this has had a lot of influence over his poetry as I will discuss later. Scannell also has six children, similarly to Grace Nichols’ mother. Armitage (the writer of ‘Harmonium’) had a fairly normal childhood and did what most people do, he went to church and was part of a choir, aswell as his father.…

    • 1752 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    as one of the poem 's themes is change and would be an original way to…

    • 1504 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Cousin Kate

    • 517 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Carol Ann Duffy was born on the 23rd of December 1955; she is an acclaimed poet, playwright and a freelance writer, having garnered several awards on each profession. “She is a former editor of the poetry magazine Ambit and is a regular reviewer and broadcaster. She moved from London to Manchester in 1996 and began to lecture in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her papers were acquired by the Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University in 1999, and in October 2000 she was awarded a grant of £75,000 over a five-year period by the National”.…

    • 517 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The two poems are written by a twentieth century poet called Carol Ann Duffy. In her poems women are presented in various ways. For example, the women in her poems ‘Salome’ and ‘Havisham’ are both quite deranged together with disturbed characteristics as they view love and relationships in two different ways – anger and bitterness. Duffy is known to write about traumatising scenes from childhood, adolescence, and adult life through love, memory and language; as shown in these two poems. Like comparing any two pieces of literature they both equally have their similarities and differences. These two poems were written around the same time, and one peculiar thing about the poems that Duffy wrote is the fact that she produced poems about women who were unimportant and inferior to famous pieces of writings like Salome in the first two books in the New Testament of the Bible as Herodias’ daughter and Herold Antipas’ step-daughter, and Havisham in one of Charles Dickens’ novels as Miss Havisham – ‘Great Expectations’. The women in Duffy’s poems are the same women as in those famous novels, however, they have a voice of their own – the poems show what these women have to say for themselves. Love has played a big role in the two women’s lives; it had scarred them and is one of the main reasons for their actions mentioned throughout the poems. Nevertheless, how they accept the consequences of love are completely unalike, yet one similarity is that they both respond to it as hatred.…

    • 1007 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the begining of the poem Duffy starts off with a negative in opening line. "Not a red rose or a satin heart'. She tries to tell her Valentine to not expect anything romantic. This is telling the reader that it is not somthing sweet, romantic or taditional gift but something unique and original. Then in the following lines she sets out why and onion is a good gift. Duffy then uses a metaphor "It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love'. The 'brown paper' is the outside of the onion that hides the white vegetable inside. This brown skin is the wrapping paper of the gift, the onion. Duffy compares her gift, the onion, to the moon being wrapped in brown paper. This picture of the moon represents the whole onion, just afger it has been peeled. The words "it promises light' give a positive conntation meaning the moons 'light' represents love like a new start and begining of a relationship. Moonlight often provides a romantic setting. The peeling of the onion is also like two people taking off each other clothes before they make love "like the careful undressing of love'. THe different layers of the onion are like the layers of someones discovering the layers in a relationship. Therefore Duffy begins the poeam with a negative conatation and a positive connatation about the onion befoere giving it to her Valentine.…

    • 785 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays