A Mid-Autumn Night's Dream

            A mid-autumn night's dream of Love: a critical commentary on one of Carol Anne Duffy's most notable works.
             William Shakespeare once wrote "The course of true love never did run smooth." (I.i. 134) Earnestly professed by Lysander in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the character assertively articulates one of the play's most crucial themes: the complexities of love. Similarly, Carol Anne Duffy's poem Love, penned for her novel-length poem Rapture published in 2005, comments on the unpredictability of love's nature; an immortal, white-winged dove incapable of subjugation. Duffy, a poet laureate hailing from the souring and bountiful hills of Scotland, juxtaposes the paradoxical nature of love with its generic and often hetero-normative construct in the poem's colorful rhetoric. The language of love is coaxingly peppered with scintillating imagery and profound symbolism, and love's tender and heartfelt pretext, a convention of many love poems, is contrasted with its harsh and often unpredictable nature. Duffy's poetry has been described as "emotionally captivating" and "indescribably accessible" by many notable poetry critics, and this poem is certainly no exception to her many outstanding works. A formidable icon in the poetry industry, Duffy describes poetry as that which "comes from the imagination, from memories, from experience, from events both personal and public so [she] will be following the truth of that and [she] will write whatever needs to be written." .
             Duffy commences the poem with quite a powerful and assertive statement: "Love is talent" The poet could be implying that love, in the greatest sense of the word, is a talent in itself. To further comment on this point, the reader could draw the inference that, in order for one to possess a "talent" as Duffy describes it, the term contentment could be somewhat further implied.