How Duffy Present Love's Complexity In Rapture

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Rapture documents ‘The trajectory of a love affair from its giddy beginnings, with poems of almost prelapsarian sensuality, to deep love and then its sorrowful end.’ Often, the poems are full of tumultuous, complex feelings but “free of particularity, of identifying characteristics about the lover” thus Duffy implies these feelings to be universal. They are mixed feelings of despair, grief, vulnerability and hope in the poem ‘Over’. Its one worded title, which is almost ambiguous as it’s not clear whether the over-ness refers to the end of the relationship or the overcoming of the sadness of a broken heart, is brutal and void of emotion so suggestive of the restraining in of grief over ‘the death of love’; perhaps as an attempt to remain controlled and a coping mechanism to ‘endure this hour’. In the poem the reference to the ‘dark hour’ with its religious connotations (perhaps a reflection of Duffy’s on catholic upbringing) is symbolic of how it feels like the end of the world to her because her love affair is ‘over’ and the fact that she has just woken up suggests that she has come to a realization- the ‘touchable dream’ which is at the start of book in ‘You’ now unreachable and the ‘spell’ broken; perhaps the end of the relationship was inevitable, too magical, idealistic and dreamy to last it runs ‘out of time’. Time and its effect on love is a widely explored theme in Duffy’s poem, in ‘Hour’ ‘a single hour… makes love rich’ it seems they is never enough whilst in ‘Over’ the memory of their love becomes only but a blush because time is passing. The fire imagery presented by the metaphor of the ‘flushing light, which blazed’ is suggestive of a passionate relationship but along with the repetition of ‘hour’ shows loves susceptibility to time, a fire blazes but always burns out and ‘hour’ shows how short a time they were together, measurable in hours not days

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