How Does Duffy And Pugh Explore The Limitations Of Language

“What connections have you found between the ways Duffy and Pugh explore the power and limitations of language? In your response you must include detailed critical discussion of at least two of Duffy’s poems.”

Duffy explores the “power of words” in being able to translate as well as influence complex emotions and thoughts, thus reflecting on the possibilities of language. She addresses the elusive nature of meaning, which –although expressed uniformly through language-is also restricted in being unable to fully interpret that which it describes by confining meaning to words, which “stumble” clumsily. Therefore words are the only means at her disposal as “the common counters of experience”1. in Duffy criticizes the inadequacy of language that cannot “translate” itself in “River”, as it is often the imaginative response to “words” which gives them meaning as oppose to the words themselves. She manipulates language to show both how it can be used to alter the reader’s perspective in “A Healthy Meal”-but also to testify to the magical, transformative power of words, as in “Dear Norman” the speaker turns the
Similarly the question in stanza 3 invites the reader to concentrate on the actual experience of things rather than considering how to construe them by naming them. We are able to derive “meanings” from sensory details in a much more direct way, just as the river flows “until it runs into the sea”, maintaining this path despite the “different babble” it comes across-like a word search which a jumble of words-but words “in the sand” would merely be washed away and