Beautiful . . . Feminine Gospels shows its author still exploring, testing her imaginative powers and masterly way with language.” — Lesley Duncan, The Herald (Glasgow)

The first of the women explored in Beautiful is Helen of Troy. Helen is a character from Greek Mythology, known as the daughter of Zeus and Leda. She is commonly referred to as the most beautiful woman in the world, hence her inclusion in the poem. She became a figure much loved in art and history, with much of literature touching on her story. Semantic fields of beauty and sexuality, along with wealth and the juxtaposition of modern and traditional History is a key theme within Duffy’s Beautiful, and in several of the ‘ Feminine Gospel’ poems. Both within History, The Long Queen, and Sub, Duffy uses history to make her arguments. Although in The Long Queen the woman has lots of power, the other three poems expose how mistreated women are throughout history. Litotes: each stanza starts with a measure of time, 'not tonight', majority of which reference the future The rest of this stanza focuses on the monotony of her game city, Duffy using images of industry. Indeed, ‘railway station’, ’trains’‘operation’ all contain ideas of bleak scenery. Even the trains themselves are personified as ‘sigh[ing] on the platforms’. Duffy presents a grey scene of her home town, the only thing exciting her is ‘pining’ for escape. Be it ‘Glasgow, London, Liverpool’, anything that will allow her to escape from the city she has grown up in.

Placed as the first poem within Duffy’s ‘Feminine Gospels’ collection, this poem comes to represent a gold standard of remembering women’s experience, both on an individual and collective level. It is prioritized due to being first, the impactful first line, ‘The Long Queen couldn’t die’ symbolizing the extent of women’s influence and power, extending onwards throughout time.

The hallucinatory, almost feverish, presentation of Monroe’s life begins with ‘slept’. Duffy presents the woman exploited from the moment she wakes right till she sleeps. Everything in between is connected with hellish asyndeton, propelling the poem onwards, ‘coffee, pills, booze’. The reference to addictive substances foreshadows Monroe’s death, overdosing on sleeping pills. The third person discussed in Duffy’s Beautiful is Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was an American actress, model, and singer. She was emblematic of America’s changing attitudes to sexuality, becoming a sex symbol of the 1950s and 60s. She was viciously controlled by Hollywood, eventually dying at the age of 32 to a sleeping pill overdose.Not all the fantasies carry the same charge. "Work" takes a single mum, working her fingers to the bone to fill her larder, and develops her problem through a rhetoric of absurdity that leaves her at the heart of the capitalist internet trying to feed a planet. Sometimes the gritty details make a familiar point surprising. An anorexic shrivels like Alice until she is blown away as a seed, to nestle at length in the stomach of a gloriously self-indulgent eater. She has become literally that thin woman notoriously found inside every fat one, except in this version, she has no wish to get out . The voice is that of the poet, using the first person pronoun “I”. Duffy is personally speaking about women whose talent is wasted. It is within the fourth stanza in Duffy introduces the first ‘law’ of Elizabeth’s, ‘Childhood’. Duffy states that Queen Elizabeth created a society in which ‘a girl’ would feel safe wherever she was, ‘no girl growing’ without being protected. The consonance of /g/ across ‘girl growing’ reflects the sense of ageing, with the extended sound being emblematic of growing and changing. The opening line of the poem instantly outlines what it going to be important within ‘ The Long Queen‘, the focus being on the Queen herself, and the length of her reign, ‘couldn’t die’. The harsh end stop following this line compounds a sense of certainty, the statement emphasized through this grammatical structure. The use of consonance in /w/ across ‘witches, widows, wives’ creates an extended ‘w’ sound. This extended sound could reflect the unity of women, the harmonic consonance echoing through the images of women. The united sound becomes a reflection of the united women, everyone coming together under the figure of Elizabeth I.

The cave= yonic symbol of daughter's place of origin, linking her to the mother. Could also imply that women have been kept in the dark and that having children enables them to escape into the light Firstly, the consonance across ‘deep, dumped’ creates a sense of oppression, the language flowing in hypnotic circles. Furthermore, the plosive ‘p’ within both these words cuts through the narrative, representing the brutality Monroe experienced on a daily basis. The poem is an elegy honouring a loved one who has died — Duffy’s close friend, the poet Adrian Henri, with whom she had a ten year relationship, ending in 1982. The dedication is to Catherine Marcangeli, his partner at the time of his death.

Duffy focuses on the physical strength of Helen’s pursuers. They have been described as ‘heaving an ore’, ‘tattooed’, and ‘muscle’. The masculinity present within these descriptions furthers the gender dynamic of the poem. Duffy is exploring how women are prosecuted by men, the poet constantly referring to the semantics of masculinity. This is further suggested by ‘she rolled’, Cleopatra being the active participant in lines. Cleopatra ‘reached and pulled him down’, controlling Caesar with her intelligence and beauty. Bala, Ismail. "Woman-To-Woman: Displacement, Sexuality and Gender in Carol Ann Duffy's Poetry". Linguistic Association of Nigeria, vol 4, no. 2, 2011, Accessed 29 Apr 2018. Yet, although it seems gone, ‘new skin’, there are still hints that remain. The use of ‘barely’ suggests that there is something still visible, not quite getting rid of what she once had. The ‘small cross where her parents’ skulls’ is deeply unsettling. Perhaps Duffy is suggesting a part of the reason the Map-Woman was so unhappy with being known by her city was due to abusive parents, or a depressing childhood. The ‘skulls’ seem malevolent, both ‘grinned’ and ‘dark’ being unsettling images. The syntax of the opening line also places ‘my breasts’ at a focal point, the meter of the line falling upon the word ‘breasts’. This, too, places the feminine experience in plain sight, Duffy making clear the female body in her narrative depiction of a new history.