Compare and contrast the poems Mrs Faust and Eurydice :: English Literature

Compare and contrast the poems Mrs Faust and Eurydice The poems Mrs Faust and Eurydice are taken form the collection of poems called ‘The Worlds Wife’. The collection is written by Carol Ann Duffy, it is a compilation of poems that explores feminist principles, the state of feminism today and other such similar topics. The poem Mrs Faust however is not particularly a feminist poem; instead it looks into the shallow materialistic values of our society. Eurydice has feminist connotations, again though is not particularly a strongly feminist poem. Mrs Faust is written in a style that attracts the reader’s attention, the opening passage has conversational undercurrents, which has the effect of involving the reader, and in effect urging the reader to read on. â€Å"First things first-† the first line of the poem is an excellent example of the conversational tone that Carol Ann Duffy has adopted. This style of writing is also in effect in the poem Eurydice, again the opening statement is a good example of this. â€Å"Girls, I was dead and down in the underworld,† in this she has taken the conversational tone to the next level. This statement is now aimed at a specific group of people; women. By doing this, women, perhaps the main target demographic can relate to the poem more easily, and as such it will have a larger effect on them. The language and structure of Mrs Faust is very important to the meaning and effect of the poem. â€Å"We met as students, shacked up, split up, made up, hitched up†¦.† The fast pace use of short sentences and the language here reflects the fast pace of the lives Mrs Faust and her husband shared. The attention to the materialistic gains in the poem also reflects both upon the shallow love that Faust shares with his wife, and also perhaps the superficiality of our modern society. â€Å"Fast cars. A boat with sails. A second home in Wales.† This passage is quite possibly an accurate representation of the materialistic wealth that people have. She also implies that because of this the love that they share is very shallow, and perhaps does not even exist. The use of language in Eurydice is also very important in creating the tone of the poem. The opening stanza of the poem uses an extended metaphor; it uses literacy and words as a metaphor to describe the desolate underworld. â€Å"It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole where words had come to an end.† Because of the importance of language for Orpheus and Eurydice, by describing the underworld as a lack of language and words, it shows the bleakness of