‘Mrs Midas’ has a lot of subject matters within it and this may be why Duffy chose this poem to use as her base to build on and create more and more poems with the same kind of themes within them. ‘Mrs Midas’ has themes of love, loss, greed, vanity, male actions leading to female suffering, motherhood, forced separation and the love-hate relationships. All of these themes are placed within other poems within the collection. The themes of male weakness and female strength are in practically all of the poems within the collection which makes me think that this poem is the key poem within the collection.
There are a lot of links between the poems through the same kinds of theme that are in different poems but there are also differences in themes between ‘Mrs Midas’ and other poems within the collection such as ‘The Devil’s Wife’.
However ‘Mrs Midas’ does have links to ‘Queen Herod’, ‘Eurydice’, ‘Queen Kong’, ‘Mrs Faust’, ‘Little Red Cap’ and ‘Mrs Quasimodo’ and ‘The Kray Sisters’ to name a few. ‘Queen Herod’ has links to ‘Mrs Midas’ because of the theme of motherhood throughout the poem or the lack of it in ‘Mrs Midas’ as all she ever wanted was a child but now she cant because of King Midas’ “pure selfishness”: “I dreamt I bore his child, its perfect ore limbs, its little tongue like a precious latch” as her “dream-milk burned” in her breasts. This joined theme between the two poems is a strong indication that ‘Mrs Midas’ was a key poem that Duffy used while creating ‘Queen Herod’. Both ‘Eurydice’ and ‘Queen Kong’ have links with ‘Mrs Midas’ because of the theme of forced separation within all three poems. In ‘Eurydice’ Eurydice dies and is forced to come back by Orpheus but because of her superior female mind she is able to out smart him into turning back to look at her which meant he lost her forever, this is forced separation even though it is what Eurydice wanted, in ‘Queen Kong’ however it is the opposite of this poem where Queen King falls in love but out lives her “man” but wears him around her neck as a kind of talisman. This is forced separation in a different sense as it was inevitable that the gorilla would outlive her “man” and is only natural. However these are both two ends of the scale and ‘Mrs Midas’ is in the middle of it as Mrs Midas sees it as a necessity for him to move out because of the danger but there is also still love but also hurt within the marriage because of his “lack of thought” for her.
The theme of “lack of thought” is obviously in ‘Eurydice’ and ‘Mrs Midas’ but is also in ‘Mrs Faust’. ‘Mrs Faust’ is all about the woman who has it all due to her husband who earns lots of money but also cheats on her however Mrs Faust even says “I was as bad” but when Faust sells his non-existent soul to the devil Mrs Faust has the feeling of ‘lack of thought’ for her. “Little Red Cap” is just about female superiority which is a theme that runs throughout most of the poems throughout the collection. ‘Mrs Quasimodo’ has a theme of strong actions taken upon the male species and what it cares for. Mrs Quasimodo “squatted down among the murdered music bells and pissed” once she had finished taking out the “brazen tongue” of the first bell and made them all “mute”. In ‘Mrs Midas’ the clear action taken by Mrs Midas is to make him move out to the caravan as “he had to move out”.
All of these poems show male weakness and how when female stand up for themselves then they can be the superior species; in ‘Queen Herod’ she kills all the new born males, in ‘Mrs Quasimodo’ she destroys the things Quasimodo loves the most and in ‘Eurydice’ he turns around and he loses her forever. These all have the theme of female superiority and I think this was taken from ‘Mrs Midas’ and built upon to give all of these different views in the different poems.
However in ‘The Devil’s Wife’ there is a very different theme compared to ‘Mrs Midas’. ‘The Devil’s Wife’ is about the Moors Murders and is aimed at Myra Hindley who aided Ian Brady in the deaths of the moors children. This is not supported by Duffy in the poem and it seems that she condones what they did: “I was left to rot. I was locked up, double locked. I know they chucked the key”.
In ‘Mrs Midas’ Duffy has used certain different types of style and has used different uses of diction within the poem which she has then used within other poems within the collection to get different tones and feelings within the poems; this can range from the soft touch to a masculine anger.
‘Mrs Midas’ is a dramatic monologue which has been used in all of the poems in this collection. This gives a more personal touch to the poem as Duffy can express her feelings more within this format. The colloquial language, connotations, uses of sound effects such as assonance, alliteration and rhyme, intertextuality and the use of imagery are all taken from ‘Mrs Midas’ as the main poem which uses these different techniques. Most of the poems in the collection use some of these techniques in to add effect to the poem and give it a certain tone to which it is aimed to be read.
My view is that ‘Mrs Midas’ is a key poem to this collection but there are a few poems within the collection that don’t follow the pattern that ‘Mrs Midas’ uses and so ‘Mrs Midas’ is not a key poem to the whole collection and so I do not agree with the statement that ‘Mrs Midas’ is the key to the whole collection.
