Summary
In this stanza, Mrs Midas learns that her husband was granted a wish, and wished to turn everything he touches into gold. Mrs Midas is frustrated and despondent. While she recognizes that everyone has wishes, she can’t believe that her husband was granted one and chose so terribly. She notes that gold feeds no one and slakes no one’s thirst: although it is technically valuable, it is ultimately useless for survival. She watches as her husband attempts to smoke a cigarette but immediately turns it into gold, and comments that at least he can give up his smoking habit now.
Analysis
This stanza uses humor as a coping mechanism to deal with the insanity of Midas’s wish. Duffy employs a pun in lines 30 and 31—“Look, we all have wishes; granted. But who has wishes granted.” She first uses “granted” in the sense of conceding truth in an argument—accepting the premise that everyone has wishes. She then uses the word in the sense that her husband’s wish was given to him—“But who has wishes granted? Him.” This play on words humorously bemoans the fact that most people would have made much better use of the incredible opportunity that her husband squandered and turned into a nightmare. This joke opens the stanza; the stanza also concludes with another joke, as Mrs Midas points out that her husband will “be able to give up smoking for good,” humorously underplaying the fact that her husband can’t smoke without turning the cigarette into gold. The pun “for good” also plays on the husband’s choice, which in Mrs Midas’s view was not only foolish but morally wrong, or “bad.”
Between these two jokes, Duffy uses vivid imagery to describe the situation and Mrs Midas’s reaction to it. She therefore interweaves humor into a disturbing situation to present a nuanced retelling of the Midas myth through a feminine perspective. Alongside this humor, however, is a real and nuanced bitterness from Mrs Midas toward her husband, which represents broader themes about the subjugation of women. “Him.” stands alone in the middle of Line 31. “He,” Midas, is the center of the myth, but now we see him from a different light: a person bitter because they could have put the granted wish to a much better use. Placing “Him.” as a standalone sentence also symbolizes the central role that men have played in history and the sidelining of women’s needs, accomplishments, and lives.
Duffy has written that this stanza incorporates the “rhythm” of her own family, particularly her Irish mother and grandmother. Her aim was to echo the vernacular of Irish woman. The reference to everyone having “wishes; granted” is intended to convey the “exasperation of women” (Barry Wood Interview). Accordingly, this stanza takes a conversational tone, as if Mrs Midas is complaining about her husband to a friend. She utilizes the second-person you—“Do you know about gold”—as well as rhetorical questions to create this sense of a conversation. This stanza is also notable for its use of diction. Duffy uses the word “aurum,” which is the Latin word for gold. She therefore ties together multiple traditions, inserting Latin into a Greek myth.
She also makes use of sensory details, specifically color and texture. The blue flame contrasts with the “luteuous stem” of the cigarette with the word luteous meaning “yellow tinged with green or brown.” Continuing to build on the theme of food that was established through the description of cooking and attempting to eat dinner and of Midas at the pear tree, Mrs Midas points out the crucial and (though not to her husband) obvious fact that gold, despite its monetary value, “feeds no one.”
