Essay Comparing Quickdraw And Hour

Quickdraw and Hour by Carol Ann Duffy
Task – To write an essay exploring Duffy’s presentation of two contrasting sides of love in the poems, ‘Quickdraw’ and ‘Hour’. Love is the main theme in Duffy’s poems Hour and Quickdraw, the similarities end there, as these two poems show two very different sides of romantic love.
Just from the name, Quickdraw, the reader already forms an idea of the violence and hurt that will be presented to them in this poem. What we do not expect however is the way Duffy cleverly uses the extended metaphor of a showdown as shown in western films, to portray the shockingly cruel aspects of the speaker’s love. Duffy’s Hour, on the other hand portrays love to be much more gentle and valuable. The opening line of
By describing the speaker as wielding phones instead of “guns”, the poet hints at something almost cowardly about the way this duel is being fought through telephones instead of face to face. The replacing of guns with “mobile phones” reinforces the idea of how anything can be harmful when used in malicious ways as is being done in the poem. The range of pain related vocabulary such as ‘groan’ and use of enjambment in the second stanza, “wounded me” to emphasis the speaker’s emotional pain as well as to convey just how toxic and destructive this relationship
Such as the natural, elemental imagery that is seen as more valuable than material possessions, such as “wine”, or jewels or chandeliers that can compare to the natural light of the time spent in a “grass ditch” watching the “summer sky”. Another paradoxical element in this poem is when the lovers kiss for “thousands of seconds”, again seeming to defy time. In Quickdraw, the phrase “silver bullets of your kiss” struck me as particularly paradoxical as well as bitter sweet. The coldness of the bullets, contrasts with the warmth of the kiss and the preciousness of the silver contrasts with the careless attitude in which the bullets “blast” the