For a change I will write underneath each stanza of Carol Ann Duffy’s Crush and discuss the poem in this way. My main concern with this method is that it breaks the poem’s flow and continuity. However it makes the thought processess as I go through the poem, easier. Anyhow a change is a change!
Dr Janet Lewison
The older she gets,
the more she awakes
with somebody’s face strewn in her head
like petals which once made a flower.
This is a beautifully mindful poem. It is reflective and meditative; gently and inclusively wise.
This stanza communicates the inevitability of life’s hauntings. The way we may be crushed or remoulded by remembrance. We are amassing lost faces throughout the course of our lives. We ourselves are included in this number. We hope that somewhere,with some one, we are remembered or extinction beckons. These lost faces remind us of our own approaching mortality and perhaps are sustaining gifts that return to light up and reanimate our minds and hearts.
The retrieving act of recollection may be unconscious, especially as the ‘night self’ takes hold. Sleepnessness reveals regret, sorrow, perhaps nostalgia, even a weariness of the weight of being alive to emotion. The ‘strewn’ petals are the broken remains of connection. Joyful exuberant emotions now metamorphised into these sorrowful confetti, fragments of feeling. ‘Somebody’s face’, sounds perhaps arbitrary, life has been long, ideals may have been shattered. But then we remember ‘somebody’ and our earlier life is reshaped before us. Thus, someone comes back to your mind even after years of forgetting or absence and you resurrect them; the contours of their face return to haunt without being beckoned.
What everyone does
is sit by a desk
and stare at the view, till the time
where they live reappears. Mostly in words.
Does ‘everyone’ do this I wonder and why is Duffy assuming so much via the generalisation? Is it part of the trick of the poem that this is a very intimate poem about one narrator’s experience rather than the universal experience suggested by the ‘we’ at the end. ‘We’ all may hide behind a generalising comment and this is part of speech and yet it is trickery too?
But then a wistful morning we look out of a rainy window and notice that we are missing our lives as we submerge purselves in detail. Look at Duffy’s unsettling use of tenses. She moves us awkwardly between temporal spaces. It feels as if I am stumbling into a present that I may not have admitted to and realsie I have been away and where am I actually living moment by moment?
The final phrase makes us think. ‘mostly in words.’ Where are we without words? Words allow us to ‘know’ how and why we feel our lives, without words where is our experience? as we drift and go mind wandering, there is the reaapearance of a moment perhaps when we felt prsent to our presence.
I do love this poem. It is certainly one of her best and its power rests with its unassuming yet devastating message about what is really important and sustaining about our lives.
Imagine a girl
turning to see
love stand by a window, taller,
clever, anointed with sudden light.
Last night I found myself reading a Jeanette Winterson story for Christmas. The Donkey’s point of view at Bethlehem. And his gentle courage is rewarded by the touch of an angel’s foot on his nose.
Yes, like an angel then,
to be truthful now.
At first a secret, erotic, mute;
today a language she cannot recall.
And we’re all owed joy,
sooner or later.
The trick’s to remember whenever
it was, or to see it coming.
Experience does not guard us from longing.Wistful preoccupation is not just youth’s heated territory! In fact the passage of time renders us perhaps even more susceptible to the intimacy of connection.Sleeplessness here suggest both haunting and obliquely acknowledged arousal through the abandonment of the ‘petals’ . The fragile image of the ‘strewn’ face in the first stanza reassures us of the recurrence of desire and in this stanza the remergence of some of the lyrical freshness of the original attraction. However it also draws intention perhaps to the loss of the freshness too, as the ‘intact’ perfect flower is now in pieces, suggesting that the idyllic aspect of the ‘crush’ may yield of necessity to dissolution. As the Friends’ Reunited web-site might testify, there is always the lingering fascination with the ‘First Love’ ?