Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2017

Carol Ann Duffy’s Demeter is far more lyrical than her other poems and looks more at a

loving relationship between a mother and daughter. Demeter follows different themes to

Duffy’s usual poems as in Greek Mythology, Demeter is the goddess of agriculture the

harvest and her daughter, Persephone, was forced to marry the god of the Underworld where

she had to stay for a few months of every year after which she was able to return to her

mother (Couch, 1998) . This poem focuses on the return of Persephone to Demeter and while

the poem is only five stanzas and a total of 14 lines it captures the love that the narrator has

for her “daughter” but also the sheer grief and mourning the narrator feels when her daughter

is “from a long, long, way”. The enduring strength of maternal love is a main theme in this

poem. This poem is the last poem in Duffy’s published work The World’s Wife , and the first

where there are no men present which makes the poem just about the relationship between a

mother daughter. If the poem was representative of divorced parents having to ‘share’ their

child, understandably the narrator would be “softened and warmed” when she finally saw her

daughter, this poem creates the significant meaning of a maternal connection with children

and mothers.

The first two stanzas centralise on the narrator’s “broken heart”, the narrator describes

“where [she] lived” as “winter and hard earth”. In Greek mythology when Persephone was in

the Underworld, Demeter would be desolate and she would make the earth “winter and hard”

so this description of Demeter in the first two stanzas definitely coincide with the mythology

of it. The deeply affecting irony of this poem is that the narrator/Demeter is perceived as

more ‘dead’ than her daughter who has been living in the Underworld. The word choices in

the first two stanzas could easily be used to describe a funeral. The ‘hard’ words chosen like

“granite” and “flint, to break the ice” are deliberate and effective choices that really captures

the narrator’s mourning and “broken heart”. Duffy creates a “cold” atmosphere which adds to

the gloomy, “frozen” feel of the poem.

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Goldsmith