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First Stanza:
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Carol Ann Duffy’s narrator Mrs Lazarus seems as dead as her famous husband at the begining of the dramatic monologue. Unsurprsingly and indeed compassionately, Duffy seems very much concerned with the possibility of ‘resurrection’ in this poem although ironically it is Mrs Lazarus’s resurrection she is concerned with centrally rather than Lazarus himself. The theme of resurrection haunts Duffy’s ‘The World’s Wife’ and indeed her poetry in general. Duffy’s characters reanimate themselves in challenging and individual ways and it is this courage which renders so many of her speakers compelling.
Mrs Laraus is bereft, abject with the inconvertibility of death. Duffy’s deployment of a vocabulary that is final and ‘past’ communicates the bleak ‘foreign’ landscape of loss that removes the mourner from any sense of belonging or community. To borrow one of Julia Kristeva’s memorable insights, Mrs Lazarus is ‘foreign’ to herself. She is estranged from ‘herself’ even to the point of being animal-like in her abject despair. How effective the repetition of the past tenses all ending in ‘ed’ are in solidifying the harsh certainty of death. The mention of time seems both specific and elastic. ‘Night’ and its separation from ‘day’ seem arbitrary. Slippery even. Despair makes such distinctions unnecessary. Death marks us and the bleeding hands( terrible stigmata?) and uncontrollable vomiting make loss physical to the point of self-‘disgust and even self-annihilation.