Summary
This poem is written from the perspective of the character Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations. It appears in Carol Ann Duffy's collection The World's Wife, published in 1999. In Dickens' novel, Miss Havisham is a spinster who was swindled and left at the altar by a man she had fallen in love with. She then becomes reclusive and obsessive, never removing her wedding dress and stopping the clock at the time she learned she had been left. She uses her adopted daughter to try to enact revenge on men, choosing Pip, the novel's narrator, as her victim.
The speaker begins the first stanza by referring to the man who stood her up at the altar, calling him, "Darling sweetheart bastard." Her love and her resentment are both clearly still raging, and the two feelings mingle. Wishing for his death has turned her eyes to "dark green pebbles," and she sees ropes growing on the back of her hands. She says, "Not a day since then/I haven’t wished him dead. Prayed for it/so hard I’ve dark green pebbles for eyes,/ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with." These incomplete sentences sound like the mutterings of a person out of her right mind.
The next stanza mirrors the first by starting with a fragmented description, but this time Miss Havisham describes herself, and she needs only one word: "Spinster." She then reflects upon the time she has spent since the wedding. She seems to have barely left this room. She spends "whole days" in bed, and she likens herself to a crow or another bird, "cawing" to nobody while the dress turns yellow with age. She says, "the dress/yellowing, trembling if I open the wardrobe..." The way Duffy phrases this line makes it unclear whether the thing trembling is the narrator or the dress. Either way, the trembling stops her from changing into something else from her wardrobe. Miss Havisham's identity has become interwoven with her dress, and her identity as someone left at the altar has become interwoven with her identity. The "slewed mirror" that follows underscores her unsteady sense of self, as does the moment where the speaker refers to herself in the third person, then in the first person: "...her, myself, who did this/to me?"
In the next stanza the speaker describes herself casting "Puce curses that are sounds not words." This echoes the earlier line where the speaker caws; the force of her pain strips her of her humanity, leaving her to make animalistic noises. She describes her dreams at night; her idea of a "better" night is one with a "lost body" hovering over her with her tongue "in its mouth in its ear/then down till I suddenly bite awake." The sexual connotations here are clear, but the phrase "the lost body" and the way the speaker refers to the body as an "it" and never a "he" or a "you" add a dark twist to the moment; this moment foreshadows the male corpse that appears in the final stanza.
"Love's/hate behind a white veil," the speaker continues for the final stanza. The enjambment Duffy uses to cut "Love's/hate" juxtaposes the two to each other physically, and the speaker leaves ambiguity about whether "love's" is possessive (the hate that love has) or a contraction (love IS hate). Either way, hate, according to the logic of this poem, is an intrinsic part of love. Most images of love in this poem are overlaid with images of hatred or violence. The next line includes one of these moments, where the speaker "stabbed at the wedding cake." Then appears the male corpse, which the speaker demands for the purpose of a "long slow honeymoon." As mentioned before, this calls back to the lost body from the narrator's dreams and furthers the necromantic feeling of the poem.
The speaker ends the poem on the line, "Don't think it's only the heart that b-b-b-breaks." Like other moments in the poem, this can be read two ways: as an imperative, or as a fragmented sentence missing a subject. By breaking up the word "breaks," the speaker emphasizes her own brokenness; the moment also reads like a stutter, which compounds Miss Havisham's difficulty communicating through words throughout this poem.
Analysis
This poem is split into four stanzas with four lines each. The poem has no set rhyme scheme, and the meter is purposefully irregular, giving the impression that the speaker is speaking jerkily. She lacks control of herself, of her words. This poem is a dramatic monologue, a form Duffy specialized in; the collection this poem appeared in, The World's Wife, is comprised of poems written from the perspectives of women from popular myths and tales, women who were previously stuck in the background of these narratives.
The first stanza shows how the speaker is stuck in her hatred and love for her ex-fiancé. "Not a day since then/I haven't wished him dead," she says. Yet she still wears her wedding dress, and is clearly mired in her failed relationship. Yet she prayed for his death so much that it hardened her eyes and made them dark green. This image indicates that she is fossilizing. She then describes "ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with." The ropes are part of her body, just as her hatred for this man is part of her.
She then refers to herself, practically spitting the word "Spinster." Then she says, "I stink and remember." Decaying and remembering appear to be the speaker's only actions now; she describes her life spent in bed, cawing "Nooooo" at the wall. Women, especially older women, are often unfavorably compared to shrieking birds. The speaker has become this stereotype.
The confusion over whether the dress or Miss Havisham is trembling when she opens the wardrobe blurs the line between the character's identity and the wedding dress and, with it, her past. Both she and the dress are haunted by the ghost of her past betrayal. When she looks in the mirror, she barely recognizes herself, seeing it "slewed" and referring to herself in the third person. With the line "her, myself, who did this/to me?" the enjambment makes the reader see "myself, who did this" broken away from the rest of the question, complicating the moment by putting the blame on herself before asking who might have done this to her. Paradoxically, she appears to be moving blame away from the man who broke her heart, perhaps because her exigent love for him does not allow her to entirely accept how he has hurt her.
As mentioned in the Summary section, the "Puce curses that are sounds not words" make the speaker less human. She is more like an animal or a witch, degraded by her humiliation. The word puce is often used to describe the reddish-purple color one's face turns when angry or aggravated, underscoring the height of the speaker's emotion while also bringing the color of blood to mind. The attention on the body in this poem highlights how the speaker's body is decaying with her mind and her sense of self.
Though night with a "lost body" hanging over oneself sounds like a nightmare, to this speaker this is a good dream. She is sexually drawn to that lost body, who can only be her ex-fiancé. She has her "fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear/then down." This line is clearly sexual, and in a way it objectifies the body; it does not move, and she does not refer to it using personal pronouns. This turns the moment sinister, for the body in her imagination does not yearn back for her. She takes revenge upon him by violating his body. However, "biting" awake seems more like waking up suddenly from a nightmare than it does from a good dream, so she does not seem to fully enjoy her revenge.
We then arrive at the curiously enjambed line "Love's/hate behind a white veil." As mentioned in the Summary section, "Love's" can be read as a contraction of "Love is," meaning that love is simply hate hidden behind a white veil (as, for example, a bride's face) or could be referring to the hate that love possesses. Either way, something waits behind that veil, with the implication that the gesture of unveiling will reveal something—perhaps that the true nature of love is not too different from that of hate.
The next line uses onomatopoeia in a way that links the image of the red balloon bursting and her stabbing at the wedding cake. The "Bang" could be the sound of the red balloon bursting or the sound of her stabbing, and the sound of "Bang" is echoed in "stab" and the first syllable of "balloon." The red balloon seems to symbolize the way the speaker's hopes were burst by her fiancé's actions, but its color likens it to an organ, to her broken heart.
The speaker goes on to stab "at a wedding cake." This action perverts the tradition of cutting cake at a wedding and turns that motion into something violent while preserving the action. This encapsulates the speaker's mixed feelings toward the man she almost married. The stabbing leads directly into the next line, "Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon." By saying this, the speaker asks both for his death and for his company. The "long slow honeymoon" she asks for hints at the long process of decay that a corpse is subject to. Is this the speaker's new idea of love, to decay with someone? Even her idea of what a relationship should look like has become warped.
The final two lines are spoken imperatively, but the addressee is unclear. The speaker seems to address the reader and the reader's voyeurism. It is the reader, not her ex-fiancé, whom she vaguely threatens. She stammers over the word "breaks" in the final line, which indicates difficulty with language and nods again toward the fragmentation of her identity. However, the stammer sounds deliberate. She could be mocking her own sobs, or she could be imagining the way her ex-fiancé would babble if she were able to hurt him in the way she wants to. The tone of this final line is darkly playful, spiteful but not without a touch of humor. The speaker gestures toward something that breaks other than a heart but does not name it; this leaves the reader searching for an answer, but dreading finding one.
