Poem in Duffy’s Style

The poem Sid Vicious Mother

The poem Sid Vicious Mother is written in the first person and espouses the negative emotions that a female person has owing to poor relationships at her home place. The poem has a direct relation to the work by Scottish poet, Carol Ann Duffy’s work in The World Wives (1999). The poem serves to bring out the efforts that women have to go through daily bearing the struggles that they have to face nurturing their families. The main struggle that the person is facing in her family emanates to the insensitivity of her husband to help her nurture her family, thus, the comparison of her husband to animals such as dogs and pig. This commentary explicates three poems from world wives namely: Medusa, Mrs Midas and Salome in correlation with Sid Vicious Mother. Based on the details of the literary text, one may tend to feel empathetic to the person owing the stressful situation that she is undergoing and the negative emotions that is increasingly growing into her.

Most of the stanzas in the poem

Most of the stanzas in the poem have an equal number of lines and a uniform rhyme scheme at the end of each line. The poem has eleven stanzas, a feature that is almost similar to the poem Medusa which has seven stanzas and each stanza having six lines. Mrs Midas and Medusa have five and ten stanzas respectively each maintaining a constant number of lines. The rhyme scheme in the poem brings about a musical flow to a reader. Sid Vicious Mother is also premised on the poem Medusa, taking into consideration that Medusa is a metaphor besides being a person and the oppressed. The metaphor means jealous lover. A jealous lover tends to have negative emotions. The feelings of the speaker draw to the literary technique of sensibility. An audience would definitely get to sympathize with the suffering that the speaker has to perpetually go through.

The poem Sid Vicious Mother and Medusa

The poem Sid Vicious Mother and Medusa have a common theme that they pass across, women oppression. Salome is based on the biblical story of John the Baptist and Salome, where Salome ends up killing John the Baptist. Salome has a calm character in the poem and offers the impression of being submissive to the domineering male gender. However, the killing of her husband in the poem is an indication of the strength level that she is able to execute to an opposite gender with the tendency of oppressing her.

The four poems can also be classified as ballads

The four poems can also be classified as ballads since they tell stories that have been told before. Medusa also greatly invoke the use of rhetorical questions in trying to emphasize the characters’ conditions. Medusa asks, “There are bullet tears in my eyes. Are you terrified?”. Sid’s mother questions, “Am I to right his wrongs? Or am I only to guide his ways. Who will define my role in this?” From the above discussion, one thing comes out predominantly clear about the four literary works, gender roles, and perception coupled with a background of feminism form the core theme of these pieces of literature. This is demonstrated in the following phrases. In the first stanza, Sid’ mother is asking which role she should play as the mother, “What’s this burden that fate has bestowed on me? To raise an offspring,” in the third stanza of Medusa she questions why she should put up with a man who has proved unfaithful to her, “It’s you I love… but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray from home, so better be for me if you were stone.”