Duffy Published Mrs Midas Several Years Before Its Inclusion in The

Duffy Published Mrs Midas Several Years Before Its Inclusion in The

Worlds Wife To What Extent do you agree With the View That, In Terms

of Subject Matter and Style, This poem is Key to the Whole Collection?

As ‘Mrs Midas’ was published several years before ‘The Worlds Wife’

was you may think that this poem may be the key to all the others

within the collection as Duffy would have been able to build the

collection on the base that ‘Mrs Midas’ set with its views on male

weakness and female superiority.

Indeed this poem has a lot of links to other poems through their

different subject matters and also they have very similar uses of

different styles and devices used in poetry.

‘Mrs Midas’ is about a woman who finds out that her husband has wished

for everything he touches to be turned to gold as he was owed a favour

by Apollo, who gave him this gift of turning everything to gold.

However King Midas doesn’t think about the consequences of his actions

and it turns out that indeed everything he touches turns to gold and

so he cannot eat because his food turns to gold. Mrs Midas becomes

scared that he will turn her to gold and sends him to a she always

wanted. This poem is about male weakness, the fact that he didn’t

think about his actions and how they affected other people but however

cruel he was to her in her mind she always sticks with him even though

he was regardless in his decision.

‘Mrs Midas’ has a lot of subject matters within it and this may be why

Duffy chose this poem to use as her base to build on and create more

and more poems with the same kind of themes within them. ‘Mrs Midas’

has themes of love, loss, greed, vanity, male actions leading to

female suffering, motherhood, forced separ...

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...e which has been used in all of the

poems in this collection. This gives a more personal touch to the

poem as Duffy can express her feelings more within this format. The

colloquial language, connotations, uses of sound effects such as

assonance, alliteration and rhyme, intertextuality and the use of

imagery are all taken from ‘Mrs Midas’ as the main poem which uses

these different techniques. Most of the poems in the collection use

some of these techniques in to add effect to the poem and give it a

certain tone to which it is aimed to be read.

My view is that ‘Mrs Midas’ is a key poem to this collection but there

are a few poems within the collection that don’t follow the pattern

that ‘Mrs Midas’ uses and so ‘Mrs Midas’ is not a key poem to the

whole collection and so I do not agree with the statement that ‘Mrs

Midas’ is the key to the whole collection.