Carol Ann Duffy: A Poet Of Sophistication, Style And Substance...

HOW DOES CAROL ANN DUFFY PRESENT CHILDHOOD MEMORIES IN BEACHCOMBER ?

NEW RELEASE March 12th 2020

By Stuart

Carol Ann Duffy employs simple yet evocative language and a blaze of vivid imagery to present her speaker s childhood memories in Beachcomber.

First, Duffy s powerful, if enigmatic title Beachcomber is a metaphorical trigger that frames the theme of the poem: her speaker s attempt to comb for moments from her childhood when she follows a drift line along the beach in search of objects that the sea has cast ashore. The simple memory of encountering a fossil, a red spade, a shell and a conch on the sea shore stimulate her search to delve deeper and harder into those now distant memories. Indeed, her search parallels the reader s desires to rekindle the seashells of their own childhood.

Second, Duffy s use of the second personal pronoun you on no fewer than seven occasions creates an emotional bond between poet, speaker and reader. The reader empathises with and is swept along by the beachcomber s excitement as she scoops and sweeps the sand in search of simple, personal memories. Cleverly, Duffy s use of the personal pronoun prompts the audience to evoke their own childhood memories. In the same way that childhood is an ever-present entity in every adult including her speaker, Duffy challenges her and the reader too - to look harder and find that special moment from their own childhood. The reader is excited by the intensity of Duffy s assertive, affirmative tone: You can see her.

Furthermore, and in contrast, the writer appears to dismiss and reject the notion that childhood memories can only be captured through sepia , suggesting that a photograph only immortalises childhood superficially. Symbolically, sepia is often synonymous with ageing, fading, classic photography, which could also suggest that Duffy s speaker is struggling to keep alive those fast fading images of childhood.

Crucially, Duffy employs powerful aural devices like alliteration and assonance to evoke the speaker s sense of recalling the sounds of the seashore. One can almost hear the echo of the scoop of the bucket filling with sand and the gurgling sound of sea water as it seeps into sand holes dug by the speaker on the beach. Such playfully easy and innocent sound verbs invoke an entertaining, childlike innocence and stimulate the speaker s - and our own - senses. Perhaps the onomatopoeic sssh combined with the lyrical use of seashells creates a smouldering sound of waves crashing onto the seashore or, alternatively, replicates the sound of a small child silencing those around her as her inner conscious intensely focusses on recalling the echoes of waves lapping the shoreline in her carefree, salad days of childhood.

Additionally, Duffy s recurring use of the imperative mood exemplified by trow , go , think and feel , drives the passion, intensity and intellect of her poem. On the one hand, her speaker is instructed to delve harder into her consciousness for sea-shell memories of that distant beach. Critically, Duffy provokes the reader into beachcombing their own idiosyncratic childhood memories. Like a nursery teacher encouraging a child to pen her first word, build a sandcastle, or explore a new sandpit, she urges, even commands us, to reconnect with our own childhood. The intensity of her language is encapsulated in her brutal, dictatorial command: If you think til it hurts. Like her speaker s visceral experience, we should feel it in our guts too. Similarly, her powerful imperative go for the sound of the sea combines the alliterative, evocative force of her instruction to run with the graceful, calming, lyrical effect of the alliterative s which triggers and stimulates the speaker to go for it, be brave, and try to recollect a memory.

Duffy s powerful piece de resistance is undoubtedly her evocative language. Her beautifully dramatic and vivid image platinum blaze evokes a fierce intensity. The effect conveys her speaker s childhood memories bursting into life in a brilliant ball of fire. As readers, we too are drawn into the majesty of the blindingly luxurious image of a rare, silver-white sun whose spectacle and memory are as resplendent and rare as the prestige of platinum and the brightness of summer sun itself.

However, in contrast, Duffy s language is also ambiguous, conveying the effect that her speaker s memories of her childhood are ambiguous or perhaps vague and distant too. Vague narrative deployed such as something and nearly there are devoid of the sound and fury and separate the speaker from her childhood. The speaker s memories are perhaps ambiguous too, as Duffy s pivotal blaze suggests connotations of fiery destruction and a hint of emotional turmoil. Negative connotations and dark idioms encapsulated in her phrase bring her within an inch of the heart suggest most dramatically and disturbingly of all that the speaker s search for a childhood memory can be a painfully heart-stopping moment. Likewise, the verb scare (one of Duffy s favourites which keeps us on tenterhooks) conveys the potential shock of the adult as she prepares to reconnect with an image of childhood now long since gone similarly, the alarming recollection of beach crabs could shock and startle the speaker in much the same way that seeping in conjures negative connotations of unwanted memories oozing or flooding back to haunt the adult.

Perhaps most crucially of all, Duffy stresses that her speaker s childhood memories are fleeting, restrictive memories. Wistfully, with a dash of melodrama, her speaker declares that memories are so near and so far , a vague idiom that laments the agony of coming within touching distance of a lasting childhood memory, yet at the same time conveying the impossibility of holding onto a memory for any significant length of time. But, just as the speaker feels a sense of disconnect, Duffy, with unbridled optimism, intervenes with an encouraging, one-word sentence Harder in which she wills her speaker to bravely concentrate and focus on recollecting that specific memory.

Ultimately, rather brutally and clinically, Duffy abruptly closes the door on her speaker s childhood memories with the grave authority of a heartless prison guard denying a prisoner his moment of fresh air in the blaze of the summer sunshine. But this is as close as you get declares Duffy in a menacingly disturbing tone as she imposes a limit, even a barrier, on evoking and reconciling further childhood memories. Time has been called on childhood memories, as, disappointingly, older, shaking hands cannot touch the child and the earth cynically turns back to adulthood and away from the splendidly vivid brilliance of a platinum blaze.

Finally, rhetorical devices and structure are pivotal in Duffy s representation of childhood memories. Duffy s powerful use of a rhetorical device in her final thought-provoking stanza is ambiguous. Perhaps she is asking what the speaker would say to her younger self. Or, does the ambiguity lie in a more general question: are we perhaps products of the past, but yet so different from them? Like a speaker searching for her past, Duffy s poem triggers some memories, yet we are left with unanswered questions and a rather ambiguous and ironic if affirmative adverb from Duffy exactly.

Likewise, Duffy s haphazard, disjointed structure cleverly reflects the ebbing and flowing thoughts of an adult as she meanders in and out of her brief childhood memories, just as the beachcomber drifts along the seashore to the tune of the waves breaking and wombing, crashing and surging. Single word sentences and enjambment reinforce the disjointed, disconnected sense of a speaker trying to glimpse an occasional memory and then, just as the tide ebbs and flows, the vivid detail is snatched away as she moves back to adulthood.

In conclusion, Duffy s evocative and vivid presentation of childhood memories sparkles with the simplicity of sea shells on the sea shore. Yet, at the same time, there is a lurking ambiguity, equivocation and tension as she closes the door on childhood memories. Nevertheless, her simple, lyrical narrative style creates the effect that whatever our status, there is a child living in all of us and occasionally, like her speaker, we need to be prompted to think harder and deeper to recollect its blaze . In Duffy s world, childhood and adulthood are not mutually exclusive and simple childhood recollections of buckets and spades and alarming crabs are eternally in the speaker s and by association our subconscious.