You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Carol Ann Duffy and Paul Muldoon represent a generation of poets who came to maturity in the 1980s and 1990s, inheriting both the modernist tradition of formal experiment and the postmodern suspicion that all language — including the language of love — is borrowed, recycled, and shaped by prior texts. Their love poems are self-conscious about the very act of writing love poetry: they ask not only "What is love?" but "How can love be expressed when every word has already been used, and every form already filled?"
Paper 1, Love Through the Ages: poetry (post-1900). On this paper love poetry is examined by comparison across the ages, and these two poets are unusually rich for that frame because their poems are made out of the older tradition — Duffy literally quotes it, Muldoon revives an antique fixed form. The dominant assessment objectives in this lesson are:
Quotation note (read first). Both poems are in copyright. Duffy's poem is itself a tissue of quotations, so the verified embedded phrases below are quoted exactly; Muldoon's refrains are quoted exactly, and elsewhere his dense, associative texture is paraphrased rather than risked. Quote only the short phrases given here as verified.
Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955) is one of the most widely read contemporary British poets. She served as Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2019 — the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold the post. Her work is characterised by accessibility, the dramatic monologue, verbal play, and a feminist sensibility that runs from Standing Female Nude (1985) onward.
"The Love Poem" closes Rapture (2005), the T.S. Eliot Prize–winning collection that traces a love affair from its exhilaration to its painful end. As the final poem in a sequence about a dying love, "The Love Poem" is doubly self-aware: it is a poem about how hard it is to write a love poem, placed at the point where the love it records is ending. Duffy has connected the collection to her relationship with the poet Jackie Kay, though the poems reach beyond autobiography toward the universal experience of falling in and out of love.
The wider context is postmodernism and its scepticism about originality. By the late twentieth century, literary theory — above all Roland Barthes's influential essay "The Death of the Author" (1967) and Julia Kristeva's concept of intertextuality — had made familiar the idea that no text is a spontaneous original utterance, that every text is woven from the echoes and quotations of prior texts, and that the "author" is less an originating genius than an arranger of inherited language. Duffy's poem can be read as a deliberate, beautiful demonstration of exactly this claim, applied to the most apparently personal and original of all utterances: the declaration of love. If even "I love you" is a quotation, the poem asks, where does the lover's authentic voice reside? Yet Duffy is also a poet of real feeling and accessibility, and the poem refuses to collapse love into mere textuality; it holds the theoretical insight and the lived emotion in a poised, unresolved balance that is far more interesting than either pure scepticism or pure Romanticism.
"The Love Poem" is built as a collage of quotations: it threads short, recognisable fragments from the canon of English love poetry through a frame of Duffy's own making. Its organising device is anaphora — the repeated phrase "Till love" launches successive movements ("Till love exhausts itself," "Till love gives in," "Till love is all in the mind") — so that the borrowed fragments are strung along a syntax of exhaustion and ending. The intertextual method is the poem's subject as well as its technique: Duffy enacts the claim that every love poem is assembled from prior love poems, that to write of love is always, partly, to quote.
The poem embeds verified fragments from across the tradition. Among them are Shakespeare's "my mistress' eyes" (the anti-Petrarchan Sonnet 130), Sir Philip Sidney's "look in thy heart and write" (the famous closing injunction of Astrophil and Stella I), Christopher Marlowe's "come live with me" (the pastoral invitation of "The Passionate Shepherd"), Sir Thomas Wyatt's "dear heart, how like you this?" ("They Flee From Me"), Donne's "O my America! my new-found land" ("To His Mistress Going to Bed"), Thomas Campion's "there is a garden in her face," Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "let me count the ways" (Sonnet 43), Shelley's "the desire of the moth for the star," and the Song of Solomon's "Behold, thou art fair." Duffy's technique is to defamiliarise these phrases by isolating and recombining them: a Renaissance fragment abuts a Romantic one, scripture sits beside seduction, and the cumulative effect is at once celebratory and melancholy. Celebratory, because the tradition is so dazzlingly rich; melancholy, because the sheer crowd of borrowed voices implies that the individual lover can only ever ventriloquise the dead — that there may be nothing new to say.
Crucially, Duffy treats these fragments as physical, almost archaeological objects. The poem imagines the love poem as something handled, kept, folded away — a treasured relic, a pressed flower, a note in a drawer — so that the great phrases of the past are figured as cherished possessions one returns to. The repeated "Till love" drives the sequence toward an ending: the borrowed phrases are what survive when a particular love "exhausts itself." The poem's deepest question is therefore double — can a love poem ever be original?, and what is left of a love when only the words remain? Duffy's answer is characteristically poised: love poetry is always derivative, built from inherited language, yet the experience of love is always felt as unprecedented, and the relics of the tradition are how feeling outlasts its occasion. The tension between inherited language and individual feeling is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited — and, the poem implies, a consolation, since the borrowed words endure when the love does not.
Note how the poem manages the seams between its borrowings. Duffy does not simply paste the fragments end to end; she frames them in a connective syntax of her own, so that the quotations arrive as treasured objects set in a contemporary voice. The effect is a constant flicker between the antique and the present, the canonical phrase and the modern frame, and the reader is kept aware of handling the tradition rather than merely receiving it. This is why the collage feels elegiac rather than merely clever: each embedded phrase is a relic of a love that ended centuries ago, and the act of gathering them is an act of mourning as much as of homage. There is also a quiet feminist wit in the selection. Duffy frames Shakespeare's anti-Petrarchan "my mistress' eyes" — itself a mockery of cliché — beside Sidney's command to "look in thy heart and write," so that the male tradition is shown already arguing with itself about sincerity and convention; the woman poet curating the canon exposes the canon's own self-division. And by closing Rapture with this poem, Duffy makes a structural argument: after a whole sequence of trying to find original words for one love affair, the poet arrives at the recognition that the words were never going to be original — and that this is bearable, even consoling, because the tradition holds a feeling that a single relationship could not keep alive.
"The Love Poem" is, by design, a map of the pre-1900 love tradition, and almost every fragment opens a cross-period comparison: the embedded "O my America! my new-found land" invites a reading against Donne's whole erotic-exploratory conceit (and, strikingly, against Symmons Roberts's "To John Donne" elsewhere in this anthology, which turns the same Donne line to a dark meditation on genetic ownership); the "my mistress' eyes" fragment recalls Shakespeare's mockery of Petrarchan cliché; Barrett Browning's "let me count the ways" brings in the Victorian sonnet of idealised devotion. Within the anthology, the obvious partner is Muldoon's "Long Finish" (below): both poems are self-conscious about inheriting a tradition, but Duffy assembles that tradition with something like reverence and grief, where Muldoon revives an old form and fills it with mischief and menace. The comparison turns on the difference between quoting the tradition and re-inhabiting its machinery.
Paul Muldoon (born 1951) is a Northern Irish poet celebrated for extraordinary formal virtuosity, learned playfulness, puns, riddles, and an associative logic that can baffle on first reading but rewards patience with rich discoveries. Born in County Armagh, he studied at Queen's University Belfast — where Seamus Heaney was an early mentor — and has lived in the United States since 1987, latterly teaching at Princeton. His work is routinely called postmodern for its delight in surface, ambiguity, and the refusal of fixed meaning; but it is also saturated with the traditional materials of love, loss, memory, and a divided Ireland, and the tension between dazzling form and grave content is its signature.
"Long Finish" appears in Hay (1998). Its title borrows the language of wine-tasting — a "long finish" is the flavour that lingers on the palate after the wine is gone — and the poem is, at its core, a tenth-wedding-anniversary poem: a husband, sharing wine with his wife, lets the evening's intimacy summon both the persistence of their love and the violent history of his homeland.
This is the crucial correction to make about the poem: "Long Finish" is not formless stream-of-consciousness but a tour de force of fixed form. It is a ballade — an intricate medieval and Renaissance form — built from ten eight-line stanzas with interlaced rhyme, and, definitively, with two alternating refrains: the odd-numbered stanzas close on the phrase "and then some," while the even-numbered stanzas close on "between longing and loss." These refrains are the poem's engine. "And then some" begins as a phrase of abundance — the speaker fills his wife's glass "as high as decency allows, / and then some" — but as the poem's materials darken, the same words come to gesture toward excess, surplus, and finally surplus violence. "Between longing and loss" names the emotional territory the whole poem occupies: the space where desire and grief are inseparable. Muldoon's associative movement — the leaps between wine, marriage, a Japanese Noh play, and Northern Irish murder — happens inside this strict scaffolding, so that wildness of association is held by extreme discipline of form. That paradox is the poem's deepest method.
The poem opens on the anniversary: "Ten years since we were married," the couple recalled standing under "a chuppah of pine boughs / in the middle of a little pinewood." The Jewish wedding canopy (chuppah) improvised from pine branches at once sanctifies and naturalises the marriage, and the pinewood it conjures will return, terribly, later in the poem. The speaker pours the wine — a "Simi Chardonnay" — and the tasting vocabulary ("finish," and the body of the wine) bleeds into the vocabulary of the body: he notices his wife's "one bare shoulder, the veer of your neckline" and, with unguarded marital tenderness, the "all-but-cleared-up eczema patch on your spine." This is love at ten years — not idealised but exact, affectionate about the imperfect, particular body.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.