Duffy’s “Crush”
One of the consequences of the publication of Carol Ann Duffy’s Rapture has been—at least so far as I’m concerned—to review her early love lyrics. The reception of Rapture has focused on the emotional openness and vulnerability of the persona revealed in the book, a contrast, it is implied, to the tough-minded and sceptical character of her earlier work. It is true that Duffy is best known for a poetry in which the aggressive, insensitive, emotionally alienated or even violent side of the human pathology is represented and expressed. As Antony Rowland has argued in his essay on Duffy’s love poetry, this perspective is a consequence in part of her subversion of masculinity and the masculinist ethos in her series of male personae poems from “You Jane” to “Psychopath”. Tough words chosen for “tough” characters.
But, with the toughness, there has always been a strain of melancholy tenderness in her work (“Liverpool Echo”, “Prayer”, etc.) and in the more autobiographical love lyrics a sense of the precariousness and problematical uncertainties of sexual relationships. Even her hard-bitten Standing Female Nude is not without a smidgeon of sympathy for the male artist and, within that continuum, Mrs Beast expresses need and desire as well as anger, disillusion and distrust. The over-riding pathology of desire and yearning in Rapture changes our perception; but there are a number of poems from the early volumes which, as it were, prefigure the commitments of her most recent work.
“Crush” is a notable example of this. There are differences of course: individual poems in Rapture exist within the structure of feeling of single autobiographical narrative; “Crush” is a part of Mean Time and thus, whatever its romanticism of imagery and gesture, resonates with the surrounding ironic scepticism. The romantic idiom of the poem (the “face strewn in her head/like petals”, etc.) is qualified and constrained by a perception of human fallibility, limitation and uncertainty: “we are all owed joy,/sooner or later”. The pause at the line-end and the cautionary phrase: “sooner or later” inject a kind of Larkinesque realism into the emotional ambiance of the poem. As does the allusive brush with Donne in the phrase “Yes, like an angel then” with its distant echo of “Then as an Angel” in “Aire and Angels” and the perhaps more important allusion to Hardy’s “The Voice”: “Yes, like an angel then” almost exactly mirroring the rhythm and metre of Hardy’s “… yes, as I knew you then”. But whereas Donne’s poem progresses by way of a complex argument by analogy and Hardy’s is based in a single trope of his dead wife’s voice (re-)calling him to times of their early love Duffy’s poem is constructed on a series of five short stanzas each of which contains a distinct statement or image. And each four-line stanza opens with two lines of two stresses (the exception being “Yes, like an angel then”), followed by lines which have three or four stresses. The effect is laconic, dry, with any tendency to emotional extravagance or intensity which is suggested by the title-word “crush” constrained and distances, and the possibilities of romantic hyperbole (“like petals which once made a flower”; “love … anointed with sudden light”) checked or subverted. The tone is cautionary and ironic: those who wait—rather disconsolately the rhythm suggests—for “the time / where they live” to reappear find that it does so “mostly in words”; the girl, subject of the “crush”, the infatuation, and whose love appears “anointed with a sudden light.// Yes, like an angel then”, is brought up short “today” with a “language”—a structure of feeling and experience—which she “cannot recall”, which time and memory have drained of its mute, erotic immediacy. The final stanza “crushes” the idea of an infatuation which promises unqualified fulfilment and joy. Joy is “owed .. / sooner or later”:
The trick’s to remember whenever
it was, or to see it coming.
This is a quintessential Duffy “trick” which also links her to Donne and Hardy, and to Larkin. If what survives of us is love—in the often misused line from “An Arundel Tomb”—it is dependent on our recollection of what “was” and our capacity to see what’s “coming”. In the poem’s terms “the older she gets/ the more she awakes” to the almost-instinct which is “almost true”, though “mostly in words” and images.
Barry Woood 2007