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Havisham Poem Analysis

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“Havisham” is a poem based on “Miss.Havisham” on the novel “The Great Expectations”. The author Carol Ahn Duffy used several techniques to describe her feelings and symbolizing her emotions with objects emphasizing love and hate throughout the poem.

In the poem, she introduced 5 different colours to represent her feelings and emotions which has made it very effective for the readers. For example, “green” implies jealousy, which shows how Havisham is envying the woman who took her man, compeyson, and is known to be very negative colour. Another colour is “yellow”, implying decay and rotting this particular colour is used connotatively by showing her mind and sanity. This makes the reader images the reality of Havisham’s life and rotting away like a dead animal and is fitty, even her body, mind and emotions. In addition, Duffy used colour “Puce”, the Brownish purple colour, which is used to describe her darkness and hurt by his husband. This makes the reader to think of blood and position, wants her fiance to die in poison. Last phrase is ‘red balloon’, which represents her heart that is fragile that breaks easily and colour ‘red’ usually symbolizes fear and anger, which is the current state that Havisham is in. Then in the next sentence she used the word ‘bang’, is used to describe the bursting of the balloon and the wedding cake. These metaphorical use of colour effectively tells the meaning of the poem, which is vengeance and revenge.

In addition, we see Duffy opening the poem in an oxymoronic way. She uses imagery to …show more content…

She represented different types of colour such as puce and dark green to symbolize of each aspect. She made the length of each stanzas about the same, to show Havisham’s dull image to create the reader sympathy towards her. Lines with no punctuation shows enhances the idea of natural conversation, as the reader is able to feel like they are talking to

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