London And Havisham Comparison Essay

Carol Ann Duffy and William Blake present the impact of betrayal especially the fatal illness it leaves behind on the narrators. Duffy, however, explains sickness through a single character whereas Blake looks at multiple people.
‘London’ for instance describes the brutal exploitation of the church towards the civilians in the streets of London whereas Duffy’s poem Havisham similarly evokes heartache, loss but not murderous intention like Havisham does, after the narrator’s fiancé left her at the altar. However, the two poems explore in the depth the feelings of immobility and lack of control of their own lives which leads them to realise these changes that have been inflicted on them cannot be altered.
Although Duffy’s poem is intertextual piece extracted from the novel ‘Great Expectations’ by Charles Dickens character, Miss Havisham, her character here gives insight to her mental instability and her lack awareness of that fact. The first stanza starts with the words

‘Beloved, sweetheart, Bastard’. The indication immediately resembles nostalgic endearments that have now become hatred. The oxymoron ‘sweetheart, bastard’ implies the characters confusion of her feelings. Havisham both remembers her love but now is accustomed to hatred of her former lover. Therefore the feelings overlap.

For example in both the second and third stanza, Duffy uses the interrogative ‘her, myself, who did this to me?’ to imply the character Havisham is confused about her feelings of her current state. Also the use of the pronouns indicate again her mental instability as she questions her own actions but from a third person perceptive which suggest Havisham is detached from own body and cannot adopt her own body anymore due to its unrecognisable state i.e. her ‘lost body’. (Believes her body has left her like her fiancé and all that remains is the bitterness which her current body symbolises). Duffy wants to depict Havisham as an ill woman, infected by the sting of love and cannot get over it.
Similarly, in Blake’s London the narrator or the speaker only describes the people around him in a bleak, startling way.

He so eloquently mentions the ‘mark in every face’ connoting the similarities of those individuals around him, followed by ‘marks of weakness...woe’ portraying the depressing situation the character is surrounded with (the people around him are deeply scarred by the despair). Blake purposely uses imagery to clearly justify the feelings of the civilians around him which mirrors his own dismay, again the cold harsh reality around him. Blake takes the reader on a sensuous journey that describes the dangers of what the plutocracy has created, how it seeps through the people around him. He constantly repeats the term ‘I hear’ to emphasise the repetitiveness that surrounds him and how he is tired of it all. Overall this poem explains the poison that has befallen on him and those around him. Furthermore, this poem portrays his sickness of the streets of London and the sickness of

others.
In Havisham, Duffy expresses the powerful feeling of hatred towards both herself and former lover. She reciprocates this feeling in the first stanza
‘Not a day since then
I haven’t wished him dead, Prayed for it’
The speaker’s feelings are that of betrayal which has spun into vicious vengeance against her former fiancé. The two verbs ‘wished’ and ‘prayed’ indicate Havisham’s lack of power to enforce her words into actions. There is a thematic image of the speaker spending most of her time wanting to punish the former lover into oblivion which gives the reader the Havisham’s lack of priority in this context. Duffy runs this image throughout the poem to suggest Havisham’s obsession.
Blake, on the other hand, proposes the men and women that surround him stress their frustration and their hatred of the situation. For example ‘the youthful harlot’s curse’ implies the young girls that have fallen into prostitution from possibly the church taking away all the joys of men like their sexual desires which has then condemned the poorer class with less money and jobs than before. The noun ‘curse’ infers the women displease with these men that ‘plague the marriage hearse’ or, in other words, the wives.