The subject of her latest work [Rapture] is the specifics of love, not the specifics of the lovers. Its inhabitants could The main themes of Rapture are love, loss, loneliness, gender issues, and death. [ citation needed] Reception [ edit ] An extended rhapsody on a love affair, ushering the reader from first spark to full flame to final, messy The poem is a traditional sonnet comprising fourteen lines, and following loosely an ABAB CDCD EFEFGG rhyming pattern. It also follows the metrical rhythm usually associated with sonnets, iambic pentameter, that is five metrical feet or iambs per line, where a iamb is one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable. Free of particularity, of identifying characteristics about the lover who could be anyone but is not quite everyone'

An Unseen’, published in Duffy’s Laureate Poems collection Ritual Lighting, was commissioned as a poetic reaction to Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Send-Off’. But it also strikes a chord with readers of Rapture, envisioning “all future / past” as the speaker asks, “Has forever been then?” and is told, “Yes, / forever has been.” It seems only right that the real answer to ‘now what?’ comes to us not from the living but from the dead. In ‘Snow’ (from her 2011 collection The Bees), the icy flakes scattered by the ghosts that walk beside us offer space and silence, and the possibility of healing and redirection. The dead also offer a different question: “Cold, inconvenienced, late, what will you do now / with the gift of your left life?” She was the first poet to push language and form, their limits and tensions, to articulate that bankrupt and dislocatedPoetry is above all, a series of intense moments... I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotions' These works are also her most formal - following in the tradition of Shakespeare and John Donne, Duffy’s contemporary love poems in this collection draw on the traditional sonnet and ballad forms."

a coherent and passionate collection, very various in all its unity of purpose. In the language and circumstances of our The voice is that of a first person speaker, we can assume the poet, using the pronoun “I”, and referring to “we” of the relationship. This is the third poem in Duffy’s collection entltled Rapture. Of the fifty-two poems eighteen are sonnets. The sonnet template is favoured by poets for serious subjects, including love. Duffy traces the progress of a love affair, with all its fluctuations, joys and heartache. Gone is the sharp sense of history, the wry snap of modern life, the distinct yet palatable feminism; all those competing stories she delighted in telling have dissolved, it seems, in the single most important story of all, that of the human love affair.” Duffy is operating on a different plane, ahistorical, archetypal, where ‘moon’ and ‘rose’ and ‘kiss’ come clear of the abuses of tradition to be restored to the poet’s lexicon, as the things of the world are restored to the lover.”Logan, William (11 April 2013). "Heart's Desire". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 24 June 2019. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ In Duffy’s poem the love she describes is fluctuating, romantic but also painful. Although it ultimately relates to a relationship on earth the religious hints are clearly present. Rapture is studied as part of the OCR (EMC) A-Level qualification in English Language and Literature, across schools and colleges in England.