Havisham - An overview

  
This poem is a monologue spoken by Miss Havisham, a character in Dickens'
Great Expectations. Jilted by her scheming fiancé, she continues to wear her
wedding dress and sit amid the remains of her wedding breakfast for the rest
of her life, while she plots revenge on all men. She hates her spinster state - of
which her unmarried family name constantly reminds her (which may explain
the choice of title for the poem).
 
She begins by telling the reader the cause of her troubles - her phrase
“beloved sweetheart bastard” is a contradiction in terms (called an oxymoron).
She tells us that she has prayed so hard (with eyes closed and hands pressed
together) that her eyes have shrunk hard and her hands have sinews strong
enough to strangle with - which fits her murderous wish for revenge. (Readers
who know Dickens' novel well might think at this point about Miss Havisham's
ward, Estella - her natural mother, Molly, has strangled a rival, and has
unusually strong hands.)
Havisham
 
Beloved sweetheart bastard.  Not a day since then
I haven't wished him dead.  Prayed for it
so hard I've dark green pebblesfor eyes,
ropes on the back of my handsI could strangle with.

Spinster.  I stink and remember.  Whole days

in bed cawing Noooooat the wall; the dress
yellowing, trembling if I open the wardrobe;
the slewed mirror, full-length, her, myself, who did this

to me?  Puce curses that are sounds not words.

Some nights better, the lost body over me,
my fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear
then down till  suddenly bite awake.  Love's

hate behind a white veil; a red balloonbursting

in my face.  Bang.  I stabbed at a wedding cake.
Give me a male corpsefor a long slow honeymoon.
Don't think it's only the heartthat b-b-b-breaks.
 
Havisham Duffy obviously takes the figure of Miss Havisham from
 Dickens's Great Expectations.  But the question then is: why?
to what effect? what, in this pre-existing figure, presents itself
as an opportunity for the writer? how is Duffy's figure different
from Dickens's?

One simple thing: The title is Havisham, rather than Miss

Havisham - which is how the character is always referred to
throughout Great Expectations.  Why, to what effect?
Perhaps Miss defines the character socially - whereas the poem
concentrates on the nature of the character's individual
feelings - the character's psychological/sexual nature, rather
than her social being.  The absence of the formal title also
makes the 'feel' of the poem blunter, more simply there,
perhaps.  Duffy's poem gives Miss Havisham a body, a knot of
desires which Dickens does not attempt.
beloved The poem begins as if addressed to the jilting bridegroom.  It
sweetheart doesn't continue in this direct address - by the end of the poem
bastard the male figure will have become a male corpse - any male
(generalised), and radically rendered into an object (no longer
even alive).
The most striking thing about the first sentence is the
combination of 'love' (beloved sweetheart) and hatred
(bastard).  Dickens's character is motivated by revenge alone -
against the male sex in general.  Duffy is interested in the
unstable combination of desire and hatred; Havisham's desire -
her sexual being - is not simply cancelled out by the
unreliability of the bridegroom: it continues, as Havisham's
body must continue - in an uncertain, knotted compound.  This
is what I take to be central to the poem and Duffy's treatment
of the pre-existing character: Duffy gives the character a body,
a continuing sexual being.
dark green The description of her eyes stands in here for the effects upon
pebbles her psychology of her continuous hatred: pebbles because the
resultant hardness in her feelings; dark because of her 'evil'
thoughts of revenge (wishing him dead) - but also because the
mix of her feelings are not simply to be understood, even by
herself; green out of envy (of the man, of anyone with a
happier life).
ropes on the The 'ropes' are the veins on her hands, swollen by age.  But
back of my note - throughout the poem it is almost as if she blames the
hands man for her getting old, as if ageing is the consequence of her
abandonment, her lack of fulfillment.  And in this line, the
'effects' of her unhappiness are fantasized as the means of her
revenge (strangle).
Spinster This one word sentence is what she is, what society sums her
up as, what she has been condemned to be by the man's
abandonment of her - almost as if there would be nothing
more to say about her for the rest of society.
stink and What her life is - in her own eyes: decay and memory - that is
remember all that she's been left with to do.  The absence of any
meaningful, physical action in the present is central to her
bitterness.  What is there for her to do? (whole days in bed...)
cawing cawing makes the woman sound animal-like.  Throughout the
Nooooo poem, language is under pressure, breaking down. (curses that
are sounds not words...and the last word  b-b-b-breaks; her
tongue only becomes fluent in  dream, and then only in kissing,
not speech).  Both sexual passion and speech require a partner.
the dress One of the few visual details which is simply taken from
Dickens.
her, myself In looking at herself in the mirror, there is a momentary failure
to recognise herself as herself.  She has aged so that she no
longer looks like her self-image.  This change in appearance,
this ageing without having 'lived', is felt not as something
natural and expected, but as something 'done' to her, and as
such, done by somebody - the jilting bridegroom.
some nights In this verse, in dream, Havisham can momentarily enact her
better desire.  The verse is sexual and physical in a way quite
impossible for Dickens - even if he had wanted to suggest
something of this continuing desire in his character (which he
did not).
bite awake Even in this verse expressing desire, it ends however on a
moment of hate and revenge.  (the progress from mouth and
ear, then down - does this fantasize a revenging emasculation
of the bridegroom's body?)
Love's hate The third verse's combination of love and hate is confirmed in
this phrase which straddles the break between verses - so,
drawing attention to the oxymoron, the unstable mixture of
Havisham's emotions.
red balloon The balloon - like the wedding cake - is suggested by the
 celebrations which did not take place.  Red for passion,
physicality - love; bursting, for hate, and also the intolerable
emotional pressure which the poem expresses.
male corpse The corpse and the long slow honeymoon combines both love
and revenge; long and slow is a peculiar combination of
enjoyment and torture.
The tone of this line is a world away from Dickens' Miss
Havisham; it sounds more like a kind of psychopathic Mae West
in its flip sexual aggression.  So kind of 'strong' is it that perhaps
only the stutter of the last line restores the 'pathos' of the
situation, perhaps.
don't think it's Dickens presents a character whose sentiments have become
only the heart twisted, whose heart (as she melodramatically announces to
the young Pip) has been broken.  Duffy's character is more
fundamentally under pressure - physical desire, language -
these 'basic' human attributes - have both been refused proper
expression, and have become knotted and skewed.  The
stammered b-b-b-breaks enacts a kind of collapse caused by
this.

Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway (1556-1623) was a real woman - famous for being the wife of
William Shakespeare. (We do know some things about her - she was nine years
older than her husband, but outlived him by seven years. They married in
1582, when Anne was already pregnant, and had three children together.
Although Shakespeare spent many years working in London, he made frequent
visits to their home in Stratford-upon-Avon.)

In the poem Anne sees her relationship with Shakespeare in terms of his own
writing. She uses the sonnet form (though she does not follow all the
conventions of rhyme or metre) which Shakespeare favoured. She suggests
that as lovers they were as inventive as Shakespeare was in his dramatic poetry
- and their bed might contain “forests, castles, torchlight”, “clifftops” and “seas
where he would dive for pearls”. These images are very obviously erotic, and
Ms. Duffy no doubt expects the reader to interpret them in a sexual sense.
Where Shakespeare's words were” shooting stars” (blazing in glory across the
sky) for her there was the more down-to-earth consequence of “kisses/on
these lips”.
She also finds in the dramatist's technique of “rhyme...echo...assonance” a
metaphor for his physical contact - a “verb” (action) which danced in the
centre of her “noun”. Though the best bed was reserved for the guests, they
only dribbled “prose” (inferior pleasure) while she and her lover, on the second
best bed enjoyed the best of “Romance/and drama”. The language here has
obvious connotations of sexual intercourse - we can guess what his verb and
her noun are and what the one is doing in the other, while the guests'
“dribbling” suggests a less successful erotic encounter.

The poem relies on double meanings very like those we find in Shakespeare's
own work. It gives a voice to someone of whom history has recorded little. The
language is strictly too modern to be spoken by the historical Anne Hathaway
(especially the word order and the meanings) but the lexicon (vocabulary) is
not obviously anachronistic - that is, most of the words here could have been
spoken by the real Anne Hathaway, though not quite with these meanings and
probably not in this order.

 What does this poem say about the nature of imagination?

 Explain, in your own words, how the central image of the “second best
bed” works in the poem.
 How well does the poet adapt the sonnet form here?
 In what ways does this poem appeal to the senses?
 Is this poem more about Anne or her husband, or is it about them both,
as a couple?
 Does this poem change the way you think of William Shakespeare?

Anne Hathaway - Carol Ann Duffy

n her poem entitled 'Anne Hathaway', Carol Ann Duffy adopts the persona of
Shakespeare's widow. The introductory quote from Shakespeare's will 'Item I
gyve unto my wife my second best bed' reminds us that Shakespeare's best
bed was reserved for guests, and that Anne inherited the one that she and her
husband slept in. This bed becomes the focus of the fourteen-line poem.

In the opening two lines, Duffy uses a metaphor to express the magic of the
bed in which Shakespeare made love to Anne: it was 'a spinning world / of
forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas'. More metaphors follow in lines three
and four as Anne Hathaway recalls their lovemaking; she expresses the notion
that Shakespeare would 'dive for pearls', and she describes the sweet words he
said to her as 'shooting stars' that landed on her lips when he kissed her.
From line five to line ten Duffy uses imagery in a fascinating way that relates
directly to the fact that Shakespeare was a writer. Anne sees her body as 'a
softer rhyme to his ... now assonance', assonance being a figure of speech in
which the same vowel sound is repeated. Then follows the charming
personification of his touch, portrayed as 'a verb dancing in the centre of a
noun', giving a feeling of grace and delicacy. Anne says that she sometimes
dreamed that Shakespeare had 'written' her, wishing that she herself were
part of his artistic creation. She metaphorically imagines the bed as 'a page
beneath his writer's hands'. She sees their lovemaking as drama enacted
through 'touch', 'scent' and 'taste'.

In lines eleven and twelve a contrast is created to the early magic of the poem
in the description of how the guests, in the best bed, 'dozed on, / dribbling
their prose'; no poetic lovemaking for them! But line twelve then switches to
Anne's alliterative description of Shakespeare as 'My living laughing love'. She
tells us in line thirteen how she treasures her memories of him with the
metaphor 'I hold him in .the casket of my widow's head'. The final line
compares this act to the way in which Shakespeare held Anne so lovingly in
that second-best bed. The last two lines are a rhyming couplet, just as the last
two lines of a Shakesperian sonnet would be, ending the poem with a sense of
unity.

Duffy's 'Anne Hathaway' is a poem full of rich imagery, the tale of a woman
who remembers her husband in a wonderful, loving way with no hint of
sorrow. It is beautiful to read and to dwell on the magical pictures that are
painted within it.

Stealing

This poem (based on a real event) is written in the first person. The speaker in
it is very obviously not the poet. Carol Ann Duffy writes sympathetically in that
she tries to understand this anti-social character, but he is not at all likeable.
What she shows is not so much an intelligent criminal but someone for whom
theft is just a response to boredom. Throughout the poem are hints at
constructive pursuits (making a snowman) and artistic objects (a guitar, a bust
of Shakespeare). The thief steals and destroys but cannot make anything.
The speaker is apparently relating his various thefts, perhaps to a police officer,
perhaps to a social worker or probation officer. He realizes at the end of the
poem that the person he is speaking to (like the poet and the reader of the
poem, perhaps) cannot understand his outlook: “You don't understand a word
I'm saying” doesn't refer to his words literally, so much as the ideas he
expresses. The poem is rather bleak, as if anti-social behaviour is almost
inevitable. The speaker sees the consequences of his actions but has no
compassion for his victims.

The thief begins as if repeating a question someone has asked him, to identify
the “most unusual” things he has stolen. The poet's admiration of the
snowman is the closest he comes to affection, but he cares more for this
inanimate object than the living human children who have made it. And he
wants what has already been made - he cannot see for himself how to make
his own snowman. The thief is morally confused - he sees “not taking what you
want” as “giving in”, as if you might as well be dead as accept conventional
morality. But he alienates us by saying that he enjoyed taking the snowman
because he knew that the theft would upset the children. “Life's tough” is said
as if to justify this. The sequel comes when the thief tries to reassemble the
snowman. Not surprisingly (snow is not a permanent material) “he didn't look
the same”, so the thief attacks him. All he is left with is “lumps of snow”. This
could almost be a metaphor for the self-defeating nature of his thefts.

The thief tells us boastfully he “sometimes” steals things he doesn't need, yet it
seems that he always steals what he does not need and cannot use. He breaks
in out of curiosity, “to have a look” but does not understand what he sees. He
is pathetic, as he seems anxious to make a mark of some kind, whether leaving
“a mess” or steaming up mirrors with his breath. He casually mentions how he
might “pinch” a camera - it is worth little to him, but much to those whose
memories it has recorded.

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The final stanza seems more honest. The bravado has gone and the thief's real
motivation emerges - boredom, which comes from his inability to make or do
anything which gives pleasure. The theft of the guitar is typically self-deceiving.
He thinks he “might/learn to play” but the reader knows this will not happen -
it takes time and patience. Stealing the “bust of Shakespeare” also seems
ironic to the reader. The thief takes an image of perhaps the greatest creative
talent the world has ever seen - but without any sense of what it stands for, or
of the riches of Shakespeare's drama. The final line, which recalls the poem's
conversational opening, is very apt: it as if the speaker has sensed not just that
the person he is speaking to is disturbed by his confession but also that the
reader of the poem doesn't “understand” him.

This poem is colloquial but the speaking voice here is very distinct. Sometimes
the speaker uses striking images (“a mucky ghost”) and some unlikely
vocabulary (“he looked magnificent”) but he also uses clichés (“Life's tough”).
Single words are written as sentences (“Mirrors...Again...Boredom”). The
metre of the poem is loose but some lines are true pentameters (“He didn't
look the same. I took a run...”). Mostly the lines are not end-stopped: the
breaks for punctuation are in the middles of lines, to create the effect of
improvised natural speech. The speaker is trying to explain his actions, but
condemns himself out of his own mouth.

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If we compare him to the speaker in Education for Leisure it is hard to say

which is more dislikeable. This one is more sane and predictable - he is a serial
offender, but perhaps poses little risk to people's life and limb. The character in
Education for Leisure is far less in control of his or her actions and may well be
insane. It is interesting, too, to note that both of these characters refer to
Shakespeare.

 How does this poem create a sense of a real person speaking?

 What does the reader think of this character? Does his explanation of
why he does what he does make us like him more or less?
 Is this person like the speaker in Education for Leisure, or different, in
your view?
 The speaker recommends “taking/what you want”. Does the whole
poem lead you to agree with this attitude?
 What might the last line of the poem mean? Can we read it in more than
one way?
 The whole poem seems to be spoken by the thief. Does the poet find
any way to help us as readers to form our own independent opinion of
this character?
 Starts with a question in line 1 - interacts with audience - challenges and
gains interest
 "Midnight" - image of darkness, night - links to perceptions of thieves
and night-time.
 "mute" - silence and unanswering, personification of object that is the
snowman. No interaction with this except on physical level (identifies
narrator's social difficulties?)
 "mate" - friend/sexual partner/soulmate? - narrator able to identify with
the inanimate snowman. Their minds are compares in simile form as
both being cold like
 ice - cold mind, reserved, indifferent, uncaring of people's reactions to
his/her actions.
 "Better off dead" - identifies own moral structure, that taking what you
want to take is acceptable - outside mores of society. This is character's
way of life, stealing for the thrill, to feel alive.
 Lines 7-9 - Difficulty of stealing and moving the snowman illustrates and
enhances the feeling of futility in the narrator's actions. Huge effort to
steal something that has no monetary worth. The snowman's only value
lies within the feelings that it invokes in both the thief and the victims.
 "fierce chill" - character gets to feel through his/her actions, gains some
sort of emotional response (unattainable in 'normal' circumstances?)
 "Part of the thrill" - the narrator steals with the full knowledge of the
upset that his/her actions will cause the victims. Identifies the cruelty
and selfishness of his/her actions and tat this is the motivation for the
theft.
 "Life's tough" - using this as an excuse for actions, absolving self of
blame. Possible feeling that is doing the children a favour - teaching the
about the 'real world.'
 "Ghost" - like a spirit, malevolent image, insubstantial thing (as
snowman is - hence attraction to it?). Ghost is something outside of
society, unacceptable.
 "leave a mess" - character deliberately defiles people's homes - part of
cruelty and thrill derived from other's misery and suffering.
 "gloved hand" - shows intelligence, leaves no fingerprints. Also a
separation from his victims, has no direct physical contact with them or
their things, has a barrier between himself and these others in society.
 "Mirrors" - image of insubstantiality - reflections formed by mirrors,
links to ghost and snowman.
 "I sigh like this - Aah" - character gains relief/freedom/sense of worth
from actions (Has found own place in society?).
 Lines 16-18 - Act of stealing and reassembling ruins the snowman so act
is in this sense worthless. Destruction of snowman follows. This could
have been done at the original site, with the same effect on the children
who built it, so why move it at all? It is this that identifies fully the
 narrator's need to steal for kicks, as it is only this that could explain the
reasons behind the actions. Was the original intention to destroy the
snowman?
 "It seems daft now" - realises futility but makes no apology for actions -
identifies the need for something to permeate the intense boredom felt.
 "Alone" - key word, no place in society, like the ghost he/she is
compared to, insubstantial within society?
 "Sick of the world" - no place within the world and no reasons to act as
it dictates. Is this dislike of the world an excuse for the actions, a reason
for the actions, the cause of the actions or an effect of the actions?
 "eat myself" - intense image of boredom. Would harm self to overcome
boredom and is doing so. Not in such an overt way but in a more subtle
psychological way. Through actions is harming self as is further
distancing self from others and causing self to be more alone, and
therefore more bored and out of place. The image is an identification of
the narrator's life, boredom, punctuated only by random acts of
vandalism, theft and cruelty. There is no meaning to his/her actions
other than to satisfy and entertain at other's expense.
 Ends with another questions that is an even more overt challenge to the
reader. Shows that the narrator considers him/her self to be
misunderstood and alone, that his/her experience is something outside
of normal understanding and comprehension. Possibly this is some sort
of way of excusing him/her self for his/her actions.

First impressions:

According to some sources Duffy's poem 'before you were mine' draws its
inspiration from an old photograph of poet Carol Anne Duffy's mother stood
laughing with friends as a young woman in the 1950s. According to this
analysis the speaker in the poem, presuambly  Duffy, is looking at the
photograph of her teenage mother, trying to imagine what type of girl she was
before she became a mother - before you were mine. However, in the context
of the poem there is no specific reference to a photograph and while some of
the dream-like imagery might suggest that the speaker is looking at a frozen
image like a photograph it is by no means an obvious point to make. It has also
been suggested that Duffy is speaking directly to her mother, either in the
sense that her mother is stood in front of her, or that she is speaking to
memory of her mother, either way it isn't obvious.  

Personally I have always read this poem as a form of daydream, of a young

Duffy trying to picture what her mother was like as a teenager. This is a
common enough thing to do as I am sure that most of us have wondered at
one time or another what it would be like to travel back through time and see
your parents as teenagers. What would they be like? Would they be like you?
Would you recognise them? Would you see something of yourself in them?
Certainly the speaker in the poem recognises something of her mother since
she says 'I knew you would dance like that,' which suggests that even though
her teenage mother looks very different, there are still certain things about her
which have never changed. Moreover, whenever I read this poem I always
detect a tone of sadness and regret bubbling beneath the rather fun and
upbeat imagery of the poem. Duffy uses the past tense throughout the poem
which certainly makes structural sense since she is looking backwards through
time, but I have always felt that there is a great sense of loss behind this poem
- a lost mother, of good times never to be re-lived. Lastly, during my first
reading I also noticed that it is quite a short poem, just four equally balanced
stanzas with some subtle rhymes and enjambment which gives it a very
informal and deeply personal and spontaneous feel, almost as if Duffy was
writing the poem as she was dreaming/thinking about her mother. If you think
about it, none of us know what our parents were like when they were young
and in this sense that is part of our parents that we can never know or truly
understand. I remember speaking to a friend of my father's who told me
stories about what he and my dad used to get up to when they were teenagers
and how I felt that I was being told something which was secret and very
precious.  

What I like most about this poem is the way Duffy flits back and fourth
between larger, more general images of her mother standing with her friends,
or dancing in a 1950s dance club, to small, intensely personal childhood
memories of her mother teaching her how to waltz on the way home from
Mass, or that of a very young Duffy putting her hands inside her mother's red
dancing shoes and somehow connecting with this playful side of her mother.

 
Structure:

Four equally weighted stanzas of five lines each. The poem has a cyclical
structure in that the poems starts with a reminiscent view of the the mother,
moves forwards and backwards through time and ends with a playful relfection
of the mother, while the last line of the poem refers back to the title of the
poem. The word 'before' sets the reflective tone of the poem and can be used
as a reminder that this is poem about looking back and reviewing the past
through memory. Duffy also uses enjambment or run-on line to help keep the
gentle, reflective pace of the poem tripping over rather like the dance hall
rhythms and imagery of the poem. This is meant to be a playful but soulful look
at the mother and as such the tone and pace of the poem need to be
respectful but betray some sense of the youthful charactef of the mother.

As said before the poem is cyclical, but we can go further than this and say that
as the poem and the speaker travel back to the past, into the before, the
speaker regresses to an earlier age, in other words she gradually becomes a
child again, fondly remembering the good times she had with her mother.
However, we can also note that the mother is also notably absent in some of
these childhood remembrances, more specifically the red shoes memory. We
often connect with the past through objects which hold a special, personal
significance such as a watch, a piece of clothing or in this case a pair of red
shoes. From a structural point of view we can say that the poet is leading the
reader to these images and objects of special personal significance since she
wants the reader to share in their symbolism. In this sense we can describe the
poem as a kind of journey. Some people call these dream-journeys
dreamscapes, figurative or symbolic places in our minds and memories where
we can relive past events or even create fantasies from old memories.

In terms of the poetic form of this poem, it is possible to recognise some of the
conventions of the ode form which traditionally is used to sing the praises of a
person often by establishing a connection with them through an object like a
vase, watch or photograph. Having said that, this is something of a stretch of
the imagination and we would be better off describing this poem as a free form
poem which appears to follow a simple four stanza, five line rule . A quick
count of the syllables shows some similarity but nothing of great significance.

Language:

Informal, friendly, familiar tone relfecting the personal nature of the poem.
Duffy mentions specific locations in Glasgow, places which some people might
recognise as being popular meeting places in the busy city of Glasgow but
which obviously hold a special significance for the mother and consequently
Duffy.