There are plenty of poems in English Literature which are Love poems
(too many to attempt to mention).
There are plenty which are poems of Seduction (especially from
the 16th and 17th centuries - a distinguished example would be To His
Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell) - that is, poems which try to persuade
the addressee (normally a woman) of the sensual delights of a sexual
relationship.
There are few enough which might be termed poems of Lust (plenty
of sermons, no doubt - but few poems. - why?)
One distinguished example would be Shakespeare's sonnet: Th'expense
of spirit in a waste of shame.. - which I shall use in the
commentary which follows as something to bounce the Duffy poem off of)
By a poem of Lust I mean a poem which focuses on that sense of
physical compulsion - where sexual pleasure doesn't feel self-chosen, a
free decision, even by the speaker of the poem.
But there's more: it's not just a sense of conflict between body
(sexual desire) and mind (free rational decision), but it also has
implications for one of Duffy's favourite forms: the dramatic
monologue. In Mean Time there are poems in dramatic
monologue form which use a persona - a voice clearly quite
separate to the writer behind it (persona derives from a Greek
word for 'mask') - for example The Captain of the 1964 Top of the
Form Team; and there are poems in which the speaker is not so
clearly distinguished from the writer. That does not mean, in this
latter case, that the speaker is simply assumed to be equivalent to the
writer, but that the gap between speaker and writer is not set up
as a particular issue (for example here, you might think of poems like Litany
and Stafford Afternoons - but there are plenty of examples of
this mode).
In Adultery the speaker of the poem is not 'comfortable'
with the consciousness behind the poem - it is a 'foreign' voice;
neither is it a persona, an assumed voice for this occasion: it
is both and neither, the voice of self' and 'non-self', at the same
time.
I don't want to complicate - and what I am struggling to say in fact is
very simple - as everyone knows this uncertainly placed voice: the voice
in our heads which both persuades and blames, which tells us what to do
(so, it isn't quite 'us', if it is telling) and also then criticises us:
both compulsion and conscience at the same time.
(And we suddenly notice that these 'voices' - which seem disparate - are
in fact united by their ability to infiltrate our minds and bang on in
an unavoidable way).
There are points here to make about Duffy's use of monologue -
she uses it not in a simple 'dramatic' way each time. Rather, at
times, she can dramatise the theatre in people's heads: the 'play'
becomes internal. She is very good at the strong, definite
statement and attitude at the level of the line - which becomes complex
by relating it to other definite statements, which don't seem to rest
easily with it: the poem becomes a series of lines pulling in different
directions, or problematic in their relation to our sense of the
speaker. I would argue that some of Duffy's strongest poems are
like internal theatres of conflicting views, each line or implication of
attitude pulling against another. (For a clear example of what I mean:
look at Havisham - where a conventional persona poem, a
dramatic monologue is becoming transformed into a poem of internal
conflict).
|
Wear
dark glasses in the rain |
Shakespeare's Sonnet begins with an attempt to place Lust,
to put it down, to speak at some distance above it. The
irony of the poem will be that at its last couplet that attempt at
distance will collapse:
All this the world
well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that
leads men to this hell.
Duffy's poem begins, by contrast, by giving over the voice of
the poem to Adultery itself; it is as if Adultery is giving instructions
or directions: do this. The mode of the verb could
either be the imperative - an explicit direction or instruction
(and how perverse that will come to be across the poem: who wants
a beginner's guide to adultery, a set of instructions on how
to do it?), or it could be the habitual present tense. Do
this, or this is what I (you) do. But, of course, part of
the point of the poem is that these two different modes are, in
fact, exactly equivalent: what you habitually do is to act
according to an imperative, to act under compulsion.
And what is done is already perverse: to wear sunglasses when
there is no sun. Obviously what is implied here is, to wear sunglasses
to hide your identity; the poem begins by hitting on the necessary
secrecy of adultery. But it also wants to put an additional
spin on this image; wearing sunglasses, you view the world with
changed colours: |
Regard
what was unhurt
as though through a bruise. |
Perverse
- because what is being viewed was previously 'unhurt'; it is only
this behaviour you are indulging in which has produced the 'hurt'.
The recolouration of the world, your view of it now (following the
directives of the compulsions of adultery), arise from one thing :
Guilt.
The 'moral' assumptions, implications, of the poem are
suggested by the additional gloss/explanation of what this means:
you will see the world now with the imposed colour of |
| ......A
sick, green tint. |
| Sick.
There is no praise or 'understanding' of adultery here - the poem
is as 'moral' as the Shakespeare sonnet. And 'green' is the
colour of decaying flesh, as well as envy. |
New
gloves, money tucked in the palms,
the handshake crackles. |
If
the last verse ended in guilt, this begins in the excitements -
new possibilities - of a new relationship, of the beginning of an
affair. 'New gloves' suggests dressing up, the crackling of
the handshake suggests a kind of electrical excitement. Why
'money tucked in palms'? That's as you think - I've no
particular answer - beyond a kind of suggestion of something 'childish'
in the whole thing. (I can remember as a kid keeping notes
in my hands, covered by gloves - so I wouldn't lose them.
Can't you?) I would point to the first line of the fourth
verse - 'sucking a lie with a hole in it' also as suggesting
something childish: covering up the smell of the forbidden
cigarette with a polo. (Haven't you also done that in your
time?)
|
Hands
can do many things. Phone.
Open the wine. Wash themselves...... |
| This
is the tone of temptation - these things are possible (and 'hands'
follows on from the 'crackling' of the handshake in the same
line). So arrange the date: phone - then the meal: open the
wine - and then....The list of actions jumps unexpectedly to
washing. The physical act which will make this adultery is
left out, occluded. Why? We will get to the naming of the
physical act itself at the end of the poem. Instead we have
the washing of hands - like Pilate, suggestive of the attempt to
wash off guilt. But the poem again swerves away from that
suggestion. Instead we have: |
|
Now
You are naked under your clothes all day
|
| Well
of course anyone is - except they're not generally conscious of
this all the time: the line is very suggestive of the sexualising
of the mind in this state of desire and excitement: this state
of adultery is the impossibility of the mind being able to
think of anything else. The itch and urgency of desire is
there with you all day. You are |
| slim
with deceit. |
More
exciting, more sexy because of this new feeling of desire,
more exciting because it is illicit.
And there is now no stopping. 'Only the once' would leave
you unsatisfied, the desire not slaked - and what's worse: the
feeling of being younger reversed, made into its opposite: |
Only the once
brings you alone to your knees,
miming, more, more, older and sadder,
creative.
|
Why
creative? Because needing to go on with the lie - needing
the excitement of the forbidden - you are going to find ways to go
on with it.
There's a kind of bitter perversion of the artist's life in this
verse: creativity has become the ability to lie, and language |
| unpeels
to a lost cry. |
| Everything
about the addressee's life is being rendered down to something
basic. (Think here also of Havisham's cries in the poem
which follows this one. There's a kind of opposition being
set up between the inarticulate urgencies of physical desire and
the elaborate life of language. |
| You're
a bastard. |
| This
comes as a kind of moral summary of where the addressee of the
poem has got to - what they now are: liar, cheat, betrayer. But
does that matter to them? No .... |
| Do
it do it do it. |
Moral
judgement, guilt, etc - are easily swept away by this urgent
compelling imperative. (And the language of the command is
suitably basic).
But that phrasing can seem too reductive - it can't in itself do
justice to the 'romance' 'you' might tell yourself, how 'you'
might see the affair. (And there is a 'romance' in adultery:
how many works of literature can you think are precisely about
relationships outside marriage? It's not difficult to find
you've come up with a whole armful of a list.) So we get: |
Sweet darkness
in the afternoon; a voice in your ear |
| The
poem - as I read it - is pretty leery of such 'romance': it's 'a
lie with a hole in it'. The position of the poem is not far
from that of the Shakespeare sonnet:..'none knows well to shun the
heaven that leads men to this hell.' But unlike the
Shakespeare, it doesn't want to set up a simple opposition; it is
interested in the process of what might be termed
'self-persuasion': how and why it might seem like a compellingly
good idea at the time. So the reductive vision and
terminology of 'lust' is kept in play at the same time of that as
'romance', rather than one simply replacing the other: |
a voice in your ear
telling you how you are wanted,
which way, now. |
The
voice is both the lover's, and that of temptation. 'How you
are wanted' is the satisfaction of being emotionally valued,
loved, but the addition of 'which way', to my ear at least, blurs
it into the physical mechanics of sexual positions. The
sentence ends on that physically urgent 'now', as did the second
verse.
This consummation of the affair takes place out of 'your' ordinary
life, out of 'time' |
|
A telltale clock
wiping the hours from its face
|
| And
there is a kind of close-up of physical and emotional
satisfaction: |
your face
on a white sheet, gasping, radiant, yes. |
| The
'yes' is orgasmic - but also an agreement with the whole package -
and the poem immediately cashes out the cost of that package in
the next two lines: |
Pay
for it in cash, fiction, cab-fares back
to the life which crumbles like a wedding cake. |
That
the poem does not allow itself to linger on that radiant 'yes'
makes it pretty evident that its ultimate intentions are 'moral'
(broadly defined).
The crumbling wedding cake - as well as being an appropriate
symbol for a collapsing marriage - also might be taken as looking
forward to the following poem: Havisham. Both poems
focus on the knotting of desire and broken relationships - though,
whereas in Havisham, the 'problem' is the absence of
an actual physical relationship, here there are one too many. |
| Paranoia
for lunch |
| This
continues the idea of cost - and we're back to the setting of an
adulterous tryst. 'Paranoia' - because of the fear of
discovery by the partner, because of the fear of betrayal by the
lover. |
|
Too much |
| The
problem of adultery is excess - too much of everything - and
related to the poem's stress on repetition, which will
increasingly inform its second half. |
Too much
to drink, as a hand on your thigh
tilts the restaurant. |
| The
tilting of the restaurant is both the excess of alcohol, but also
the giddiness of urgent physical desire. |
You know all about love,
don't you. |
| The
tone now adopted by the voice of the poem towards 'you' has become
sarcastic, sardonic. The terms which follow mock the terms
'you' use in order to romanticise adultery. 'Love' is not
the voice's term - imagine it rather in scare quotes. |
|
Turn on your beautiful eyes
For a stranger who's dynamite in bed
|
| This
is a different kind of imperative from those of the first
verse; this is how 'you' fantasize what adultery promises -
'love', 'beautiful eyes', dynamite in bed', are all clichés of
the romantic fantasy which urges you onward. (The 'heaven'
which tricks, in Shakespeare's sonnet.) And the ultimate
fantasy is that it is endlessly renewable; it can happen |
again
and again. |
| But
a more realistic costing out of the price of this fantasy is: |
a slow replay in the kitchen
where the slicing of innocent onions
scalds you to tears |
This
seems a deliberate reprise or echo of the central image of Valentine.
it's one of the ways the volume hangs together as an integral
work: the use of repeated images and phrases - threads to draw the
work together, and set the poems in relation to one another.
But after this apparent regret - |
|
Then, selfish autobiographical sleep
in a marital bed
|
| Dreams
are always autobiographical - by definition - but this
enclosedness in the self is underlined in the situation 'you' is
in (and 'self-' and 'auto-' , meaning the same underline this by a
kind of tautologous repetition). While in bed beside the
'legitimate' partner, all that 'you' can think of, dream of, are
desires, experiences which cannot be shared with them. |
your body
stirring betrayal, your heart over-ripe at the core. |
| And
the motive for this separation is down to the body - to 'your'
physical desires. |
You're
an expert, darling; your flowers
dumb and explicit on nobody's birthday. |
| If
all the fore-going applies - then you're on expert on the adulterous
way of life; 'you' know all there is to know of what it
means. But the insincere praise of the poem's voice has
mutated into the insincere voice of theatrical flattery -
'darling' is a cliché of backstage mutual flattery among
actors. And, of course, the theatrical comparison is apt;
the adultery, its secrecy, can only be maintained by acting, by
lies. And like a prima donna in opera or the theatre, there
are the rewards: the gift of flowers. The unexpected gift of
flowers arrive at home; it's nobody's birthday - so why the
flowers, the betrayed partner might question. So the flowers
are both 'dumb' - in that they say nothing about why they have
been given - but they are 'explicit', because they are so
obviously suspicious. |
| So
write the script |
| So,
if you 'know all about love', if 'you're an expert',
if you can act so well - then you can write the
script - that is, 'you' know how this is going to go. And
what follows is, the poem suggests, inevitable disaster and
unhappiness: |
illness and debt,
a ring thrown away in a garden
no moon can heal, your own words
commuting to bile in your mouth, terror - |
If
you know all this (and we've come a long way from the
'beautiful eyes', the knowing 'all about love' in verse 7- this is
what you really know), then the question forms: Why?
Why go through all this - for what?
so, we really are in the same territory as the implied
question behind the final couplet of Shakespeare's sonnet: |
All
this the world well knows yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. |
| The
suggested reason, in the voice of the poem, sounds dismissive: |
and
all for the same thing twice. And all
for the same thing twice. |
Two
repetitions are at issue here: adultery is after all engaging in
two relationships at the same time: the marriage partner, and the
lover. But also, as in verse 3, adultery is not a one night
stand - it desires continuation, a repeated experience of that
original excitement.
And what is 'the thing' repeated - whose repetition is so desired
as to ignore all that preknown terror and disaster?
The poem gets the most reductive, dismissive description of what
is desired: |
| Fuck |
The
term is deliberately reductive - it stands as a further twist
downwards in register from Shakespeare's 'Lust' - which the sonnet
tries to destroy, in terms of its attractiveness, by the multiple
adjectival definitions offered of it in the three quatrains of the
sonnet. But the sonnet knows it hasn't destroyed the
attractiveness of 'lust', despite all its efforts of defining what
it is really. If it had, it wouldn't have the puzzled
couplet at its end.
Here, also, the poem knows that its 'linguistic' argument will
fail - it is, at the end, only words. |
That was
the wrong verb. This is only an abstract noun. |
| What
would be the right verb, according to 'you'? Maybe,
something like 'love'. And the poem's proffered reductive
word says nothing about what it feels like - it leaves the feeling
out of account, so is too 'abstract' to be accepted as
appropriate. It leaves out of account all those reasons
which compel the behaviour in the first place.
So the poem finishes as more an argument about words than
anything else - how words and experience do not necessarily match
- or, rather, knowing the words does not fix a view of 'reality',
since that 'reality' can always be re-described, and, anyway, is
always more than any words of description which can be offered.
But, of course, in the context of this poem (and Shakespeare's
sonnet), that limits the power of any poem (or, indeed, argument,
sermon, whatever) to change behaviour: we can always be 'creative'
in describing our desires to ourselves - and that leaves us simply
subject to our compulsions and fantasies. We are made up out
of layers of redescriptions - and whichever one happens to apply
at any given moment is not simply a matter of 'morality',
intentions or 'knowledge of the world'. |
|
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