2019 Year 12 IB Extended Essays

Discussion

Embedded in their poetry, Carol Ann Duffy and John Donne use ideas based around sex, love and gender, and empowerment verses disempowerment within their poetry. Donne creates a satirical tone to his poetry, using only a male voice, to convey his perspective on sex, love and societal norms generally creating a sense of disempowerment towards the female voice. Duffy however, reverses that, using only a female speaker and attempts to create the reverse empowerment that Donne’s poetry seemingly negates. Her poetry conveys ‘declarations of love’ to ‘uncovering abuse’. Despite the clear contextual differentiation of these two poets many of their themes merge in and out of each other. More sexually focused poems such as Donne’s ‘The Flea’ and Duffy’s ‘Little Red Cap’ are filled with vulgar imagery, and from a 21 st century perspective, the use of such carnal language causes the readers to question it. In ‘Little Red Cap’ this use of language can be linked to a cathartic form of therapy for Carol Ann Duffy, using animalistic imagery to express the instinctual and disgusting feelings towards her experience of paedophilia hidden behind a façade of ‘love’. Donne however, in his infamously satirical filled poem, ‘The Flea’, is at first comical towards what was considered a regular attitude towards women, but on further reading is seen as a criticism, causing Donne to be one of the first in his time to advocate a feministic view point towards the rights of women’s sexuality. ‘The Flea’ uses its erotic imagery as an ironic sense of choice within a sexual relationship, which directly relates to Duffy’s ideas from ‘Little Red Cap’ which continues this theme, writing on a journey of discovering her own rights. Through this, she creates the unspoken viewpoint in

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