"Syntax" by Carol A. Duffy - an Analysis

SYNTAX¹

I want to call you thou, the sound

of the shape of the start

of a kiss - like this - thou -

and to say, after, I love,

thou, I love, thou I love, not

I love you.

Because I so do ―

as we say now - I want to say

thee, I adore, I adore thee

and to know in my lips

the syntax of love resides,

and to gaze in thine eyes.

Love's language starts, stops, starts;

the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.

In Rapture (2005), CAROL ANN DUFFY

      When looking at this short poem, we feel that the author intends to sound (and look) striking. The structure, the syntactic parameters, its lexical density, even the title are tellingly significant. Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate since 2009, comes from a tradition which is extremely difficult to classify. Her early love poems differ in length, subject matter and form from the one she wrote not long before the appointment. Hence, the whole piece looks interestingly peculiar here because it may seem what it is not, revealing hints of tradition and pure contemporariness that readers should pay careful attention to.

       Let us focus on the structure of the poem. Anyone who knows a little something –or quite a lot– about poetry must have already spotted the right word for the poem’s form: a sonnet. Sonnets are, by far, one of the most remarkably famous poetical forms for structuring lines (fourteen to be more precise) in order to convey an oceanic assortment of meanings in metaphorical exposure. Choosing the sonnet might have been the perfect selection of forms and structures for a love poem, an exceptional choice for a non-risk-taker. However, Duffy is no non-risk-taker, and her preoccupations about whether to optionally go for a cliched poetic form for no reason whatsoever, or committing her choice to conveying second (critical, reader-responding) thoughts seem more reasonable.

But why is she doing this? Why does she choose to write a poem that looks sonnet-like? That’s a very good two-in-one question. The sonnet is one of the oldest poetic forms that writers have been using to show how deeply, how poignantly, how ferociously or how miserably they feel about love. And this poem is just about that: the feelings of love. Loving as a primitive feeling is sensed and experienced here in two temporally distinct directions: loving now and loving from the past. Thus, the pronouns (‘thou’, ‘thee’, ‘thine’, ‘you’), the use of modern-spelt old English words (‘shape’, ‘start’, ‘kiss’, ‘lips, ‘love’), and the old love tradition of belongingness and togetherness, very much like Petrarchan in style (‘I want to call you thou’; ‘I adore thee’; ‘to gaze in thine eyes’), all these examples clearly acknowledge the speaker’s intentionality of love-feeling and love itself.

A nother important reason why this short poem is a masterpiece resides in the essence of its musicality. Duffy has always stressed the importance of reading poetry out loud to make the most of it. And this poem is no exception. Although its rhyme scheme is untraditional (to the eyes of someone expecting a proper sonnet), its rhythm and internal rhyme, together with the strength and powerful emotiveness of the vowels and consonant clusters she uses lift it up to perfection. And because it is a poem about love and loving as a process, one can imagine that it is a process the poetic voice is willing for it to be long, as the use of diphthongs in ‘thou’ and ‘thine’ suggests, a melody of diphthongs that invites to linger on the presence of the loved one forever. Also, the sibilance along lines in the poem (‘the sounds / of the shape of the start’, or ‘love’s language starts, stops, starts’) together with the length and density of vowels and diphthongs lead to a vibrant longitude of the emotional meaningfulness of the text.

         However, the process is not linear, and neither are the sensations emanating from it. The title, which strikes us back and around from the very first glimpse of it until the end, is revealing for the uneasiness, the disorientation and imperfect ways of being in love. When we think of syntax, we think of order, structures and organisation. This poem is nonetheless realistic when we come to terms with its syntactical disorganisation. And the same occurs when someone loves somebody else: people do not think in a structured way. We do not feel when or which the right moment is, what the right word that ‘in my lips / … resides’ will make the heart –our love– start, pause and then start over again.

On balance, we are encountered with a short poem that tells us a lot more after many readings of it; a poem so touching and so mind-blowing that gets you thinking for a while, pondering whether love can be felt in such ways that no syntax in the world can seamlessly explain, just “words flowing or clotting in the heart” of whoever is to feel and love like this.

1Before reading this analysis it is important to listen to the poet herself reading the poem.