How Does Carol Ann Duffy Present The Theme Of Being Misplaced In The Dolphins(TM) and Comprehensive(TM)?

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How Does Carol Ann Duffy Present The Theme Of Being Misplaced In ‘The Dolphins’ and ‘Comprehensive’?  Carol Ann Duffy is a poet who characterizes her written poetry through carefully channelled dramatic monologues. Through her work, many themes and issues are explored, including that of loss, love, adolescence, change and being misplaced. Her propositions in this poetry are not to create a mystique or confusion, but to communicate through the usage of various personas and portray the thoughts and feelings typical to that character.     In this essay, I will look at two specific poems: The Dolphins and Comprehensive. They both include elements of misplacement, which is arguably the key theme to both. I will analyze this theme in particular, exploring how Duffy creates the semblance of the character and the techniques that are employed in her poems.     In The Dolphins, we are introduced to an enclosed persona of which freedom has been curtailed. The poem is spoken from the point of view of a dolphin, which has been incarcerated in an aquatic centre accompanied by others of its species. The second line claims “We are in our element but we are not free”, meaning the conditions in which they reside (obviously being water) are familiar, however, their habitat (the aquarium) does not allow the unrestraint found in an ocean, where they rightfully belong. “There is a man and there are hoops” confirms to the reader that the dolphins are being circus trained in order to satisfy audiences, further supported in the third verse with the line “There is a coloured ball we have to balance till the man has disappeared”. In reality, this tells us that dolphins have emotions too, that they would rather be placed back in the sea than spend the rest of their lives performing in front of
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people, and “the man”, who the dolphin’s monologue seems to attract an aspect of resentment toward.     However, it may have taken the dolphins some time to initially identify their limited surroundings – an idea revealed in the second verse: “After travelling such space for days we began to translate” is a sad twist of dramatic irony; people could see the marine mammals had been enclosed, yet it took themselves a while to realize that this was not an ocean, and that the space no longer stretched beyond horizons. To continue the irony, the last sentence of the first verse states ...

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*** 3 STARS This is a well structured essay which uses PEA throughout and makes some important and perceptive comments. There are frequent lapses in expression and in word choice which need to be edited.