My paper investigates how Carol Ann Duffy has treated love in her poetry.
It appears that she has treated love as a theme in an ironic and nontraditional
way. She has always been preoccupied by the idea of love in her
poetry. The paper also attempts to unfold the hidden messages which the
poet wants to reveal through her poems. The paper introduces the
definition of sarcasm and how it is employed by Duffy in a very subtle way.
This is then followed by her views about love and how she looks at it. Major
poems from her distinguished body of work are analyzed from a thematic
and a symbolic point of view. Being a feminist and keen to present a
different concept of love, Duffy introduces many types of women especially
those who are preoccupied by the idea of gender and the social role of
women. Her books The World's Wife and Love Poems as well as many
other famous individual poems such as ‘Valentine', ‘You' and ‘Warming
Her Pearls' are extensively explained and interpreted to demonstrate how
she employs sarcasm in very elaborate way.