Human Interest

Human Interest is a poem by the British poet Carol Ann Duffy. I am currently trying to obtain official permission to publicly display Duffy's poem on here. Until then you'll have to make do with my essay on it ;)

Human Interest by the British poet Carol Ann Duffy is the portrait of a murderer and his deed. The speaker in the poem is the murderer himself. He tells the reader what has happened and why from his first person perspective. In this writeup, I first want to show what can be deduced about the personality and, to a certain extent, the social background of the speaker by analyzing his language and the way he uses it. Furthermore, I want to demonstrate the extent to which formal elements of the poem, such as the frequent use of enjambments and caesuras, further contribute to an image of the speaker's character and state of mind.

I shall first focus on the inner second and the third stanzas, then on the outer first and last stanzas. In the inner two stanzas, the speaker tells us about himself and his lover. There are no indications of either the speaker's age or his physical appearance. The one fact that we know for sure is that he is indeed male. This becomes clear when he refers to the suspected lover of his girlfriend as "the other bloke", implying that he himself is male. About his social background we can only speculate. He says he "slogged [his] guts out for her", which indicates that he is a blue-collar, a working man. His frequent use of colloquial expressions, such as "bloke", "tart", "prick" and "guts" further supports the conclusion that the speaker is a man of simple background. Where the speaker's emotional state is concerned, we have more indicators. He thinks of himself as having been a caring boyfriend: "I loved her." His use of the past tense indicates that this love is now broken. Furthermore, he did all he could think to do for her: "I slogged my guts out for her." Working hard and bringing home the money must have been his way of showing her how much he cared. Later, we begin to realize that aside being loving and self-sacrificing, he is also possessive. In the last stanza he refers to his girlfriend as "My baby." The use of the possessive pronoun when referring to one's partner is common in relationships; however, in light of our knowledge that he killed her out of jealousy, this use indicates an overly possessive boyfriend.

In the outer stanzas the speaker tells us how he killed his girlfriend, as well as how he is feeling now, some time after the deed. The speaker was clearly irrational when it happened.

She turned away. I stabbed. I felt this heat
burn through my skull until reason had died.

He was losing his mind then, and in his rage, he stabbed his girlfriend to death. After the crime and the sentencing ("fifteen years"), emotions of grief, remorse and denial prevail: "When I think of her now, I near choke/ with grief." In this line, his regret is most visible. However, he also seems to deny his own brutality: "I wouldn't harm a fly, no joke." Here he seems to absolve himself of culpability.

The language the speaker uses generally consists of simple words and short sentences; however, the most striking characteristic is his frequent use of idiom. He often uses worn figurative language to convey his meaning. This indicates that he finds it hard to express his feelings in words. The old metaphors "She stank of deceit" and "I near choke with grief" support this thesis. Thus, the speaker finds it difficult to use language creatively to express himself.

In this last part I will briefly demonstrate how the form of the poem and the use of enjambments further contribute to the reader's impression of the speaker's state. Looking at the rhyme scheme (ABBA ABBA CDC DCD), we realize that the poem is a Petrarchan sonnet. However, the units are broken up and regrouped to form the following pattern: ABBA ABB ACDC DCD. Especially towards the end of the poem, this interrupts the flow of language and conveys the impression of the speaker being increasingly more upset. The enjambments and caesuras used in the last stanza enhance this feeling:

When I think of her now, I near choke
with grief. My baby. She wasn't a tart
or nothing. I wouldn't harm a fly, no joke.

Each line of the last stanza is an enjambment running up against a strong midline caesura, such as after "grief", "baby" and "nothing". This supports our impression of the speaker being increasingly at a loss of words, and, when confronted with his crime, broken.

In this writeup I have tried to demonstrate how language and formal elements in Human Interest help create an impression of the speaker's character and personality. We have found that the speaker is a working-class male who has transformed from a loving, giving and possessive lover into a murderer filled with grief and remorse. Now he is convicted, a broken man, torn between remorse and denial. All this we learned by paying attention to language and form of the poem.

This writeup was brought to you by the supportive front of noding your homework and the English Department of the Universtity of Bern.

Original fiction. IANAR.

I am a construct. There is a key in my back. When I am active, that is potential being used up, drained out of strange cells in my torso. I have my own room and a little typewriter. I have legs and hands and eyes. I cannot speak. These words you see are only another form of abstraction, something to let my ones and zeroes dance into being in the same patterns in your mind that they formed in mine. Does that make sense? My master winds me up. I write. I have memory and fear and eccentricity. Does this bother you? I might see you in an elevator, or a moon bubble, or a mall someday. If I tap you on the shoulder and stare, do not be alarmed. I am simply observing.

There was one child in the pediatrician's office. Mommy said that he could not play with the teddy bear because it was dirty. Simon, I think, was the little boy's name. Simon could not see dirt. Mommy said it was invisible. Why? Because it was small. Simon did not understand how something so small could be so important. My daddy is big, he thought. He gave up on the bear and sat by the window, watching squirrels. The sun burned his eyes as he gazed at treetops. Suddenly, he was struck by the largeness of the sky, the relative smallness of his own body, his Mommy, his Daddy, and their house. He could not see the invisible dirt, but he knew somehow what it meant for the significance of an object to be independent of scale. He was a very smart little boy.

Sometimes I am taller and stronger, like when I am sent through alleyways to investigate the denizens of the fringes. I touch them sometimes, on a shoulder. They don't seem to mind, usually. Sometimes they talk to me. Dorothy has no last name and no age. She doesn't remember the color of her eyes. She has no children. I think her clothes are beautiful; they are warm and mutlicolored and layered. She never smiles, but she speaks to me even when I am not there. When I feel the thick knobbles of her shawl beneath my polymer fingertips, I see a burning house, a tribe of watchful cats, a tiny child who never had a name. I see heavy hands and a dark brow, and I feel the strangeness of liquor-laden breath for the first time. Dorothy has issues with men. I do not ever want to meet her father.

In a summer grove there were five teenagers looking for gnomes under rocks. They chased invisible butterflies, sipped tea from thermoses, and talked excitedly about the coming of starlight. They looked straight at me and smiled, offering me daisies. I thought one of them grew faery-wings, but that was only when her hair flicked me gently across the nose as she danced and whirled. On drugs, I'd heard people mutter. But these adolescents were not high or stoned or tripping. They were simply imaginative. They were playing games. I recorded this because of the fascination in their heads.

There is also the Crowd, which moves sluglike through subways and waits anxiously in malformed lines outside smelly hot clubs. Different paint, but the spirit is the same. It is not difficult to bump shoulders with archetypes or ghosts. Lara is the one with too much gel in her hair and thick foundation covering the character of her face. She is not thinking about anything in particular. She will go home with Rick tonight, Rick of the white button-up pants on the other side of the crowd which is ten bodies thick. Neither of them will have a last name. Empty times, happy times. Lara will be one of those old ladies, someday, who smokes in the car with the windows up. Rick will someday decide he wants breasts. People change.

I have known love only through snapshots of clumsiness. I have known passion and power through the quickness of my own calculated grace. Here, let me get your coat, madam. To a chilled hand even plastic lips can seem warm and soft. In all things I am a gentleman, except when the situation calls for crudity. I have never brawled but I have given water to he of the cracked lip and swollen eye. I have been quiet and patient. And yet at the end of each day I return to my little room and my typewriter, and produce the result you see here before you.

There is another like me. My master created two. I am not supposed to know this but we bumped shoulders in a Moroccan restaurant and I felt the same mute introspection, the same cool mechanical innards, the same darkly obscure programming. A mirror of my own mind. I decided that this one was a she, if only because that was the way Master wanted her to experience the world, to catalog the minds and enlightenments and disappointments of humans from all facets of age and culture. I wished for her to have been created for my delight but this was not the case. When that momentary touch occurred, I felt a tiny pinpoint of awareness in reply; she knew what I was, and perhaps due to more sophisticated subroutines, considered me something to be disregarded.

I hurt that night. Badly. But then the key slowed to a halt and before I knew it the light had arrived anew, and somehow the key was already turning. And I had dreamed, my own dream, for the first time. Perhaps there will be more.