Jealousy, Betrayal, and Petrification: Ann Duffy's Retelling of Medusa's Story

Medusa, a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, will be the piece of poetry selected for discussion. The poem describes Medusa undergoing the change to a gorgon and turning a number of living things to stone. Medusa starts with a ‘buzzing bee’ and goes on to the creatures escalating in size until she transforms a dragon into a volcano. Finally, she focuses on the man who has betrayed her. In this assignment I will analyse this poem considering aspects such as the rhythm, language and imagery.

The rhythms of the poem are skilful. Rhyme links some of the stanzas together in lines three to six creating a feeling of fullness appropriate to the deaths. At the level of the metrical foot, there are several effects produced by the changes of foot. The first line ‘a suspicion, a doubt’ is a pair of anapaests, but ‘a jealousy’ is two iambs, the second of which is slightly truncated. This makes me want to hurry through the line when I come to ‘a jealousy’, which makes me slow down to think about it, and wonder if this is the most important emotion Medusa is feeling at this time. The rhythm is quite regular in the following stanzas describing the final transformation of Medusa, and her various acts of harm. However, there are two unsettling things for me about the penultimate stanza. The first four lines of this stanza all contain iambs and anapaests, yet the last two lines are dactyls (the rhythm of the dactyl being ta-dah!-dah!-dah!-and), and in this stanza the last line is catalectic, which means it is missing a syllable at the end. So two things make me pay particular attention to this line, and perhaps feel a more intense emotion.

The structure of the poem itself helps me comprehend it better. There are six stanzas and I notice that from the fourth to the sixth, Medusa changes individual animals into different kinds of stones, becoming over that same stretch of lines, “bee” to “dragon”. To me, the progression of size of the animals destroyed by the Gorgon, as well as the pang of love that she feels, are directly linked to the scale of her jealousy, which contributes to Medusa’s threat. So, the more she loves the more dangerous she becomes. Also, the last stanza consists only of one line, which sets it apart from the other stanzas. To me, the line ‘look at me now’ means two different things depending on how I read it. If I stress the word ‘now’, it seems more like a threat, i.e. if he looks now, even the dragons will be petrified. So, when she is hurt and rejected by the man who loves her, Medusa craves to change him into stone to get her revenge. If, on the other hand, I say the questions and the last line softly, it is as if she is asking him a question, begging him. I can feel sorry for her, if I ask if Medusa has made herself ugly, made herself into a Gorgon, out of love, and realise that nobody will love her.

In addition to that, the literary techniques used in the poem communicate many meanings and give various feels. There is a lot of imagery. In the first stanza the onomatopoeia in ‘hissed and spat’ describing Medusa gives me a vivid image in my head of a dangerous and horrible monster. Likewise ‘soured’, ‘stank’ and ‘yellow fanged’ all give this impression as they vividly describe snakes in physical terms and make me recollect my various experiences with them and they make me scared. There is also a lot of metaphor in this poem and it is used in diverse ways. The metaphor in the second stanza ‘bullet tears’ drives home the threat Medusa is because a bullet is a threat too and tears are similar to fragile and weak, in fact it makes Medusa more fragile and weak as tears do. In the stanza before last the ‘shield for a heart’ and ‘sword for a tongue’ use both metaphor and allusion. ‘Shield for a heart’ could mean the man has a shield in his heart to defend the love the man has from Medusa ‘Sword for a tongue’ could mean the man does not want to talk to her. They could also be allusion, meaning that Medusa was killed by a Greek man named Perseus who held a sword to cut off her head and a mirrored shield to avoid looking at her eyes, all these metaphors describe the sad result the man had with her.