How does Carol Duffy create thecharacter 'Mrs Midas'?

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Kelly Ann Mawhinney                English                         30/10/2005

How does Carol Duffy create the

character 'Mrs Midas'?

Carol Ann Duffy has done several poems including Mrs Midas, others include Havisham and Education for Leisure. These three are distrubing poems, she uses images in the poems to help convey what she wants us to see and imagine is happening.  

        In the case of Havisham she use a distrubing character from the Charles Dickens book Great Expectations, and brings the character to life, so we can imagine what this woman looked like and how she reacted to life and her feelings about others. Where-as in Education for Leisure Duffy conveys a character in which we do not know if they are a woman or a men, but she again she uses images to convey what is happening in the poem, this images are powerful and you can imagine how the character is feeling and what is about to happen. Also in several of her poems she uses colours to help set the mood and show how the characters are feeling which is a good way for expressing how you feel and without words. In 'Mrs Midas' Carol Ann Duffy uses the same affects but this time her key characters are of both sexes, i.e. a man and a woman. This poem unlike the other poems is a lighter introduced in to what is happening.

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         In the first stanza, she goes about setting the scene of the poem and the time of year in-which the poem is happening. The character in this stanza is unaware and clueless of the events going to take place. Due this fact the character is relaxed ' I'd just poured a glass of wine, begun to unwind', she is watching her husband who is in the garden 'by the pear tree snapping a twig'. She is so unaware it is sort of scary thinking about what is going to happen.

        In stanza two, her feelings had some what changed, she is ...

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