Carol Ann Duffy – “You” – The Volatile Nature of Love
In a characteristic adaptation of the sonnet form, Duffy expresses the contrasting emotions of passion and passivity, and the debilitating impact of overwhelming desire. From the poem’s outset, Duffy highlights the irrepressibility of love:
Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head,
so I went to bed, dreaming of you hard, hard, woke with your name, (ll. 1-2).Emphasised in the caesura, the adjective ‘Uninvited’ expresses the speaker’s resentment of the all consuming manifestations of the undisclosed ‘You’. The intensity of this uncontrollable fervour is conveyed through the rhyme of head/bed, the repetition of ‘hard’, and the heavy sounding ‘d’ consonance. Contrastingly, as the speaker awakes, the softening effect of love’s ‘name’ is reflected in the sibilant, sensuous imagery evoked in the similaic: ‘like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables/ like a charm, like a spell’; whilst the power of language to conjure up vivid images through the interrelation of the signifier and the signified is considered in magical terms (ll. 3-4).
The ambivalent nature of love is further expressed in the second stanza, as the speaker asserts ‘Falling in love/ is glamorous hell’ (ll. 5-6). Notwithstanding the romantic concept of heaven sent love, Duffy declares love to be hellishly cruel, whilst only superficially appealing. Animalistic desire (lust) is conveyed through the extended metaphor of the speaker’s tiger-like self, with its ‘crouched, parched heart/ . . . ready to kill’ (ll. 6-7). Eliciting the destructive propensities of love in the alliterative ‘flame’s fierce licks under the skin’ in the rhyming couplet, Duffy contrasts the speaker’s tormented passion, with the relaxed confidence of the ‘larger than life, beautiful’ counterpart, who is impassively ‘strolling in’ (ll. 7-8).
Seemingly tamed by the lover’s appearance, like the ‘earth-struck moon’, the speaker’s carnal desires seem to be love-struck into submission throughout the remainder of the poem (ll. 9-10). Sustaining the tiger imagery, ‘in the long grass of routine,/ in . . . camouflage rooms’, the speaker hides not from the physical presence of the lover, but from the imagined lover, who unyieldingly stalks her mind (ll. 9-10). Despite the suggested indifference of the ‘sprawling’ beloved, the speaker’s suffering is relieved by the welcome ‘gift’ of the ‘touchable dream’ in the closing couplet.
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