Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Text’ from Rapture: An Analysis

Human intimacy can be fraught with misunderstanding and misgiving. We all feel D-R-E-A-D at times! This media age, with its obsession with texting,  has escalated the dread of rejection, and of disappointed love intensely. There are so many ways nowadays to communicate and to be found, that our communication is up for assessment and reassessment almost moment by moment.

Our communication through texting ironically fuels our unsettled relationship to language through others.  Our signs are uncertain, we are not sure what may be normal, what may be consistent, what may be a return to our old intimacy. So we live in hope of consistency, yet find uncertainty a persistent interloper in our heads.

Texts appear magically everywhere. Texts are a strange hymn to modern life. The sounds of a text arriving are sometimes an ambivalent gift. What do the sounds signify? What are they bringing to your emotional door?

Texts may say: You are wanted, you are popular, you are loved. Conversely, they may signify Triviality. Ignorance, You need to turn that thing off and pay more attention to me, to the here  and now. Are you actually in this room? Are you even concentrating on work?

Proof of love or proof of rejection? ‘What am I worth?’ We check our texts. We look again, comparing them to a before, anticipating an after! Communication becomes a helter-skelter of ambiguity: Nausea one day, elation the next.  Whether this is emotionally healthy I really do not know. I rather think not!

Texting and the new media, give us more opportunity for misunderstanding, sudden anger  and hurt. How many ways can we find to detect a change of emotional temperature, how many ways can we build fearful scenarios around our fears?

Each relationship has its own codes.  Its own preferred language or lexis and its own ‘house style’. Any departures from these codes, destabilise our relationship with words, with reading ways  that we are cared for and loved, are  immediately noticed and then reflected upon, maybe at length. What did they mean by this or that? What is uncomfortably absent, what all too present? We ruminate on. Living in, breathing in our ‘amorous catastrophe’  ( Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse)

 Here in her poem Text, Carol Ann Duffy rather uncomfortably  admits to the re-checking of her messages! Duffy’s Rapture is very much a contemporary collection and this poem reveals our secret obsession with detecting the often subtle,  shifting revelations of love.

 The text has become iconic of the very visible, portable proof of love. It is a portable means of being found and being ‘lost’ at the same time. How a text is composed connotes how you are regarded and unforeseen alterations to our relationship’s traditions may cause fraught feeling to say the very least!

Duffy is superb on vulnerability and awkwardness. She admits here  to the embarrassment of anxiety over even a missing  ‘X ‘ at the end of a message. And no matter how much the poet may tend to the mobile phone, the reality is that the beloved is not there. Loss remains.

The simile ‘like an injured bird’ suggests vulnerability, the utmost, care, even despair. Sounds cannot infiltrate a text, so our voices remain unheard. Dread thrives whilst we attend to the deciphering of the text. We savour each word, reading, rereading, sending one back, and another until they stop. There are even codes around who sends the last text= are you busier, less busy? Happier, less happy? Uncertain, indifferent? We go on….listening out for the ‘broken chord’ that alerts us to our ecstasy or misery…

  Text
I tend the mobile now
like  an injured bird

We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
your second, your third,

look for your small xx,
feeling absurd.

The codes we send
arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,
their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press
will ever be heard.