Death and the moon

• ‘Death and the Moon’ by Duffy delves into the grief and vast emptiness following Adrian Henri’s death, reflecting on magnitude of loss
• free form, having no rhyme scheme. All three of the stanzas have a regular 8-line structure. Enjambment creates a sense of flow throughout the poem, perhaps focusing on the passing of time after Henri’s death. a haunting atmosphere, with images blurring into one another in ghostly silence.
• moon is melancholy symbol of night and the notion of death. semantics of distance, ‘nearer’,
• ‘Cold’, both within ‘Cold as cash’ and also in ‘frozen pond’ gives an idea of deep melancholy. ‘Frozen pond’ with ‘fish’ inside could symbolize how Duffy’s world has seemed to stop. Death has impacted her so drastically that everything has slowed down to still. Water, normally an image of movement and joy, is frozen solid in the poem. Death has turned the world into a haunted ice landscape.
• personal pronoun in the first line of the poem builds on the personal elegy style. 
• The oxymoronic ‘hard rain’ and ‘tough confetti’ compound a sense of disbelief. The use of oxymorons presents conflicting emotions, and Duffy is unable to understand the death of her friend.

  semantics of the body, ‘your eyes, your tongue, your soundless ears’ all silent. Silence and stillness once again prevail in Death and the Moon.
• , ‘Unreachable’, ‘Unseeable’, Duffy uses enjambement. The long white space that expands beyond these enjambed words presents a sense of distance. .

  Images of ‘the moon’ resurface, its ‘light’ casting a ‘tender’ comfort on the scene. the moon surviving forever while humanity will not.
• final image ‘black night’ creates a sense of emptiness, stretching outwards due to the use of enjambment. This is then combined with caesura following ‘huge, mute,’ to further the sense of separation. The metrical pauses which follow each of these words are depressing, each silence echoing the stillness of the first two stanzas. Duffy conveys the existential gap between the living and the dead.
• A03: greifs past lover while consoling friend his wife