Voices and monologues - Duffy and Armitage
I will compare the characters in the four poems Kid, Havisham, The Laboratory and My last Duchess. Havisham is by Carol Ann Duffy, Kid is by Simon Armitage and My last Duchess and The Laboratory are both by Robert Browning.
All four of these poems are dramatic monologues. They all give a strong message of anger and jealousy. In the laboratory and Kid they are both seeking to get revenge. In my last duchess, he has already taken revenge. In Havisham she wants to take revenge but it seems pretty unlikely that she would.
In the poem kid, Robin is speaking about batman. Armitage uses the title ‘Kid’ to imply that Robin is seen as a kid and that Batman is an adult who controls him. Robin is seen as a very much exasperated person who, like anyone, does not like to be second best to Batman and dependent on him. In the poem, he puts across that he has no life of his own. We already know, from books and films, that they are two partners that have always seemed inseparable, and we know that batman is the one who is superior to Robin and who has more authority. Robin is inferior to batman and is always around observing Batman do his duty and appears to have no role of his own. He talks about how Batman is seen as such a hero and a star, in the first line he says “batman, bigshot,” he feels that he is just a sidekick that is nothing special. He is fed up with not getting any attention so he decides to rebel against his so called ‘best friend’. The writer in Kid does encourage the readers to see Robin as he sees himself as he knows that he is rebelling which is what we are meant to think of him. All the way through the poem he claims that he is better than Batman, but it becomes clear at the end that he is sure about what he is saying with “I’m the real boy wonder”.