1. Carol Ann Duffy Critical Essay

2. Shooting Stars
Carol Ann Duffy

6. What is the poem about? What incidents are mentioned?
Initial questions
What are the connotations of the title? Is this an effective title based on the actual poem? Explain fully.
What is the poem about? What incidents are mentioned?
How is the poem structured? Does this add anything to the poem?
Who is the persona or narrator of the poem? Why are they important? Why has Carol Ann Duffy chosen this person to be the narrator?
What other characters are in the poem? What is their significance?
Religion, Persecution, History, Humanity and Feminity are all themes that run through this poem. With close reference to the text show how the reader is made aware of these themes.
The word choice is particularly emotive in this poem. Pick three examples of emotive word choice and explain their effect in detail.
Comment in detail about any feature of sentence structure that you find particularly interesting.
Find two examples of imagery and explain how they helped your understanding of the central concerns of the poem.
What reactions/emotions are expected from the reader?

7. Summary
Using the first person singular a dead Jewish woman speaks to the reader about the atrocity and suffering she and her race have endured at the hands of Nazis, reliving her own death as part of the Holocaust in the Second World War.

8. The Title
‘Shooting Stars’ is an ambiguous title referring both to the yellow Star of David which Jewish civilians and prisoners were forced to wear as well as the temporary nature of life in the metaphorical comparison of people to meteors that we call shooting stars. The shooting star is a symbol of fleetingness of life. Just as a shooting star flashes in and out of existence in the blink of an eye so too have the lives of the victims of the holocaust been brutally cut short. A third interpretation is that a heroic person who has suffered a tragic end and is deserving of this ‘star’ in the face of adversity is being shot down.

9. Poetic form Six stanza poem, each stanza four lines long.
Regular rhythm – standard line lengths – one example of rhyme in the final stanza.
Dramatic monologue in which Duffy gives a voice to someone from whom it has been unjustly taken, as she does in many of her poems.
no end rhyme (free verse)

10. After I no longer speak they break our fingers
The first stanza opens with the words of the victim of the Nazis. This is a euphemistic way of saying that she is dead. The poem reanimates her dead voice.
Her fingers are broken in order to achieve this salvaging, creating the impression of a scrap heap being picked over.
She, however values the ring for its symbolic and personal significance and not for the money it will fetch.
WC - The woman’s wedding ring is “salvaged”, indicating that her tormentors value her life less than the gold ring.
After I no longer speak they break our fingers
To salvage my wedding ring. Rebecca Rachel Ruth
Aaron Emmanuel David, stars on all our brows
Beneath the gaze of men with guns. Mourn for the daughters,
The speaker can protest forever as the poem gives her eternal life. The list of Jewish forenames, possibly her children or family members, draws attention to their cultural identity.
She says that there are stars of David tattooed on the prisoners’ foreheads and these provide a shocking target for the soldiers who will literally be ‘shooting stars’.

11. upright as statues, brave. You would not look at me.
This word simultaneously conjures up the picture of her friend slumping to the ground after being shot + reminds us of its frequent use as a euphemism in time of war. To fall in wartime is to die in battle. This is horrific enough in itself but we are presented here with women who were not even combatants; they were defenceless and powerless.
The woman addresses her friend, reminding her of how she faced death, how she ‘Fell’
upright as statues, brave. You would not look at me.
You waited for the bullet. Fell. I say, Remember.
Remember those appalling days which make the world
forever bad. One saw I was alive. Loosened
Duffy uses repetition for emphasis but, more subtly capitalises ‘Remember’ at the end of a sentence as she is drawing attention to the vital status of cultural collective memory.
Also, the crucial need for the whole world to avoid a repetition of the Holocaust is paramount.
From the persona’s perspective, however, there is no redemptive possibility, as the world is perceived as ‘forever bad’.
The woman, whose voice sounds throughout the poem, is emphatic about the fact that she wants such atrocity to be remembered
These further explore the atrocities visited on the victims of war and the heroic bravery of the women who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Their stoical endurance allowed them to wait for their deaths ’upright as statues’ but there is also a clear implication that they could be frozen with terror.

12. his belt. My bowels opened in a ragged gape of fear.
This deals with the crime of rape. The sheer terror of the woman is vividly conveyed through Duffy’s concentration on its physical effects:
The hopeless surrender to fear is momentarily mediated, though, in the glimpsed child through the ‘gap’ he woman can see between ‘corpses’.
his belt. My bowels opened in a ragged gape of fear.
Between the gap of corpses I could see a child.
The soldiers laughed. Only a matter of days separate
this from acts of torture now. They shot her in the eye.
The word ‘gape’ is often used to describe a facial expression, and this makes the effacement of the woman’s identity by such brutality even more shocking.
These events are no more than amusement for the soldiers, who are intoxicated by power which expresses itself in sexual attacks and the indiscriminate execution of civilians.
This woman’s observation that ‘Only a matter of days separate/ this from acts of torture now’ suggests both eyewitness involvement at this time –‘this’ and ‘now’ reinforce the sense of immediacy – and an awareness that memory is very short in historical terms.
The child, embodiment of life and hope for the future, is wickedly murdered.

13. How would you prepare to die, on a perfect April evening.
This stanza opens by posing a question already implicit in the previous three stanzas: ‘How would you prepare to die…?’ The counter pointed impulses of life and death are presented in the season of spring in nature, ‘ a perfect April evening’ and the ominous ‘graves'.
The woman’s ‘bare feet felt the earth’, indicating that she was sensitive to it, in direct contrast to the jackbooted, unfeeling and desensitised aggressors.
How would you prepare to die, on a perfect April evening.
With young men gossiping and smoking by the graves?
My bare feet felt the earth and urine trickled
Down my legs until I heard the click. Not yet. A trick.
The internal rhyme – ‘trickled’, ‘click’ and ‘trick’ – rolls easily off the tongue, and recreates the unexpected near silence surrounding the moment. This heightens the impression of mental torture and emphasises the complete contrast with the soldier who can view such an appalling act as a game.
The fear of rape is replaced by the fear of being shot. The sadistic soldier toys with his victim: ‘I heard a click. Not yet. A trick.’ The short sentences at the end of the line create tension and a sense of the real experience of the woman and the power wielded by the soldier.

14. After immense suffering someone takes tea on the lawn.
This invites us to question how any real normality can return after such horror but also to remember that it does, and frighteningly quickly.
People can soon return to such familiar domesticity associated with ‘tea on the lawn’ just as a ‘boy’ can wash a uniform. This could be an ambiguous use of the words as many soldiers were little more than boys and a uniform can be used by schoolboys, too.
The use of anaphora is striking, the repetition of ‘After’ emphasising that terrible things have actually happened but are almost immediately removed.
The alliteration represents sleeping forgetfulness, while the reintroduction of Jewish forenames reminds us that the Holocaust was real. The ellipsis at the end of the stanza is a stark reminder that the list of names could go on and on. There is a depressing presentation of a world that finds it easy to forget.
After immense suffering someone takes tea on the lawn.
After the terrible moans a boy washes his uniform.
After the history lesson children run to their toys the world
Turns in its sleep the spades shovel soil Sara Ezra…
There is a clear sense that the memory of ‘terrible moans’, representative of all the suffering in war, can be washed away, cleansed as simply as the Nazis thought they could erase the Jews. Children may be taught about the war in school but they ‘run to their toys’. As children, they might be forgiven for this but there is no excuse for a world wilfully ignoring the truth of a past.

15. Sister, if seas part us, do you not consider me?
A psalm is a song, and communal singing is an important aspect of cultural assertion. Many of the psalms share themes of forbearance and strength in the face of adversity, as well as absolute faith in God as deliverer.
This takes us back to the interior of the concentration camp. The woman addresses her ‘Sister’, a term more of cultural and religious significance than the simply familial.
Her reference to singing ‘inside the wire’ indicates her bravery and defiance. She champions the culture she was born into and will not be subject to ‘ethnic cleansing’,
Sister, if seas part us, do you not consider me?
Tell them I sang the ancient psalms at dusk
Inside the wire and strong men wept. Turn thee
Unto me with mercy, for I am desolate and lost.
Duffy chooses to end the poem with a quotation suggestive of anything but hope and deliverance. The twenty-fifth psalm, one of King David’s, pleads with God for deliverance from affliction, shame and death: ‘let not my enemies exult over me’ (verse 2); ‘Oh guard my life, and deliver me;/ let me not be put to shame, for I/ take refuge in thee’ (verse 20). The woman keeps faith with her religion and tradition but her words at the end of the poem articulate the most desperate facet of the psalm she quotes from.