work

• what is work about?

  a hypobolic fairy tale that follows a mother figure in tracing development of civilisation from the beginning of time to the 21st century - explores how lifestyle we lead is unsustainable due to mother-earth being overworked by rapid population growth
• 'to feed one , she worked from home , took in washing , sewing..life was a dream'

  • mother's first instinct is to provide for her child rather than herself
  • her life from the beginning of time is associated with chores , only manageable when feeding one
  • 'life was a dream' - can be sincere or saracastic
• 'she flogged TVs , designed PCS , ripped CDS , burned DVDs'

  • internal rhyme , speeds up meter of poem and suggests sense of mania
  • 'ripped' , 'burned' - IT terms that link to damage done to planet by consumerism
  • in our age of mass media , the mother nature figure has to take on increasingly demanding roles to suit disposable nature of consumerist society
• how does Duffy use the structure of the poem to show how demands and expectations placed upon women are ever increasing?

  9 stanzas - structure stays same yet content of each demands more space , phrase containing number of people the women is providing for comes earlier in each stanza
• 'died, lay in a grave, worked to the bone, her fingers twenty-four seven.'

  bleak ending to poem suggests that the mother nature figure is dying due to demands placed on her , devoting her life to others has caused her to die. Death isn't an escape. Women are exploited and overworked.