Anon

• ‘Anon’ by Duffy confronts the historical erasure of women, calling for literature to recognize and honor their voices and contributions.
• structure

  variance in structure could reflect how women have been undervalued within society in many aspects of their lives, not just relating to literature and writing. These flashes of rhyme could represent the few female writers that were allowed to exist within a canon that has always been engineered to remember white men, Duffy rebelling against this exclusion.
• stanza 1

  female pronoun ‘she’ triple repetition of the female article demonstrates the constant presence of females

  employment of the conditional tense within the first line, ‘If’ poem will be fictional, Duffy creating a scenario lost female voices of the past, while also classified as ‘lost’ or ‘anon’. in early England, a ‘nun’ was the only profession that was taught to write,
• stanza 3

  ‘skull/on a shelf’ is polysemous mechanism to show the voiceless nature of women, with the empty skull having no tongue to speak with. attempt to ‘clear its throat’, female voice has been destroyed, lost to history, and now only present in skeletal remains. Yet, the ‘skull’ could reference to ‘Hamlet’, the iconic symbol being prominent in Shakespeare’s play. Similarly, within the fourth stanza, Duffy could be connecting with iconic feats of literature to suggest that female work is just as important.

  lack of specificity allows the image to come to represent all women.
• stanza 4

  own opinions.symbolic ‘passed on her pen’, female writers beforeDuffy quotes Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ within this final stanza, ‘hey nonny’. This quote is uttered by Balthasar towards the female characters of the play, female voices to focus on themselves, stop comparing to male voices, and begin to build a new, stronger, female canon. ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ contains one of the strongest female characters in all of Shakespeare’s works, Beatrice – returns to ‘Anon’, Duffy perhaps signaling that the fight for equality is not yet over.
• Polysemous

  Soon OR anyomynous