How do James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy present ideas about the pain of love in In Paris with You and Quickdraw?

The different presentations of the pain of love are reflected in the differing uses of vocabulary in each poem. In ‘Quickdraw’, Duffy uses cowboy lexis in keeping with her extended metaphor of a shootout ‘this is love, high noon, calamity, hard liquor in the old Last Chance saloon... the Sheriff... silver bullets’. This shows the poet’s feelings that her break up was similar to a gun battle – a quick exchange of sharp, blunt words to try and hurt the other in revenge for their part in the breakdown of the relationship. Whereas, in ‘In Paris with You’, James Fenton uses informal language like ‘I’ve been bamboozled’ and makes up words such as ‘maroonded’ to show that he doesn’t feel that love requires formal and clichéd romantic lexis. This idea is repeated throughout the poem in his rejection of the stereotypical connotations of Paris being a city of romance, for example ‘If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame,’ – Fenton uses coarse language to further display his rejection of romantic love as he builds a new relationship. The word ‘Paris’, especially near the end of the final stanza, can be substituted for the word ‘love’ – this implies that the poet is avoiding confessing his feelings in the hope of avoiding another painful failure of a relationship so soon after he has been hurt.

Both poets use the structure of their respective poems to convey similar ideas about love. ‘Quickdraw’ is made up of four stanzas, each with four lines – overall seeming quite regular. But the end lines of the first three stanzas are cut off and the second halves are used as the first lines of the next stanzas. Similarly, in ‘In Paris with You’, the stanzas appear regular [three of the five have five lines] but at the end and most noticeably in the middle the layout changes – the final stanza adds an extra line, and the third is indented and made of nine shorter lines.  In both poems, this could represent the nature of love – it can appear regular but it is actually chaotic and can start and stop abruptly.

The form is used by the poets in varying ways to give insight about their views on the pain of love. In the majority of stanzas of ‘In Paris with You’, James Fenton uses an abccb rhyming pattern and in the final stanza a b is added to make the pattern abccbb. However the third stanza has a completely different rhyming pattern; it has only two pairs of rhyming lines: ‘If we skip the Champs Elysées/And stay here in this sleazy’ and ‘Old hotel room/To what and whom’. This could represent the way a relationship changes as it pans out, with the final stanza having an extra line to show the poet’s reluctance to end his romance, drawing it out for a little more time. Contrastingly, ‘Quickdraw’ is written in free verse – there is no particular rhyme scheme – showing that love is not regular but is random and does not follow a set pattern, especially in a chaotic and hurtful breakdown of a relationship. Both Fenton and Duffy use a repeated phrase to repeat one idea through their respective poems. Fenton repeats the line ‘I’m in Paris with you’ at the end of each stanza, showing that the poet does not want to dwell on the pain of his past relationship, instead wanting to bring his thoughts back to the present and his current love. Duffy does use a repeated phrase ‘and this’, but in contrast to Fenton, does not include it in every stanza – she only uses it to form the last line ‘Take this.../and this... and this... and this... and this...’ as a mantra of her desperate attempts to hurt her former lover as they have hurt her.