Although time is the enemy of love, the emotion of love and the moments spent with a lover exist outside the limits of time. Christopher Whyte, ‘The 1990s’ in Modern Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) She was the first poet to push language and form, their limits and tensions, to articulate that bankrupt and dislocated These poems are almost old-fashioned in their commitment to rhyme, assonance and metre. In several poems there is a fairytale vocabulary, and ballad forms appear in "Betrothal" and in "Give":

She is a truly brilliant modern poet who has stretched our imaginations by putting the whole range of human experiences into lines that capture the emotions perfectly.” the poems are rich, beautiful and heart-rending in their exploration of the deepest recesses of human emotion, both joy and pain. "Clearly, there is a massive transformation and the tone of the poem has changed dramatically. It is at this point in the poem we start to understand why it is called the rapture. Speaking of which note once again the reference to heaven.

If sexual desire were anything but insatiable, it would be something else. If experience couldn’t let language in, there’d be no poem, only rain. From “Bridgewater Hall”: Poetry is above all, a series of intense moments... I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotions' Is this volume, winner of the T.S.Eliot Prize, as subversive (sub-verse) as it is obsessive? Is poetry subversive? A.R. Ammons said: “Yes, you have no idea how subversive – deeply subversive. Consciousness often reaches a deeply intense level at the edges of things, questioning and undermining accepted ways of doing things. The audience resists the change to the last moment, and then is grateful for it.” The idea that the time lovers spend together should not be spent on objects such as flowers, highlights how the emotion of love can transcend both time and the material world. The three strong books that made her name in the Nineties blazed with voicings; with dramatic characters, a bomber, a psychopath, an American buying Manhattan. This voicing power emerged again in The World’s Wife, along with the same sharp humour, social criticism and satire. But those collections ended in love poems and you felt that this, in the end, was what really drove Duffy’s work. In Rapture, it comes to its full flowering: ruthless, sensuous, tender; utterly modern, utterly classical. ( Independent, 16 September 2005)

She also writes picture books for children, and these include Underwater Farmyard (2002); Doris the Giant (2004); Moon Zoo (2005); The Tear Thief (2007); and The Princess's Blankets (2009). In Duffy’s poem the love she describes is fluctuating, romantic but also painful. Although it ultimately relates to a relationship on earth the religious hints are clearly present. Secondly, it could be a reference to how the rings of a tree can tell its age, suggesting that the rings of their finger shows the years of their relationship within them. Aside from this, in the second, Duffy also uses much positive, yet physical imagery to describe the traits of her lover. The metaphor‘blessed in your flesh, blood, and hair, as though they were lovely garments’ seems to show her gratefulness for the closeness the two experienced, to the point as though they were connected as one being. Also, the very presence of her lover seemed to ‘pleasure the air’, which also seems to lift the melancholy air the poem holds. All this physical imagery could be linked to how Duffy feels they have such a close connection in their relationship. Duffy has been quoted as saying that she is ‘not interested, as a poet, in words like “plash” – Seamus Heaney words, interesting words. I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way’; and in the same Guardian profile, ‘Childhood is like a long greenhouse where everything is growing, it’s lush and steamy. It’s where poems come from’ (31 August, 2002).

Her adult poetry collections are Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Other Country (1990); Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year); The World's Wife (1999); Feminine Gospels (2002), a celebration of the female condition; Rapture (2005), winner of the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Bees (2011), winner of the 2011 Costa Poetry Award and shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Christmas Truce (2011), Wenceslas: A Christmas Poem (2012), illustrated by Stuart Kolakovic; Dorothy Wordsworth's Christmas Birthday (2014) and Sincerity (2018). Her children's poems are collected in New & Collected Poems for Children (2009). In 2012, to mark the Diamond Jubilee, she compiled Jubilee Lines, 60 poems from 60 poets each covering one year of the Queen's reign. In the same year, she was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize. The narrator uses interesting language in the first line of this stanza of the poem. They personify their thoughts and in doing so create a powerful piece of imagery. The fact that it refers to their thoughts as “uninvited” suggests that they are powerless to control how they feel and wouldn’t want to feel that way. This line definitely suggests that the narrator can’t get the object of their affection out of their head. The second line is full of innuendo. The narrator goes to “bed” which you could associate with sex and then says that they dreamed of the other person “hard” which may not be an innuendo but the fact that it is used twice for emphasis suggests that it is indeed an innuendo! The third line refers to the way that the narrator’s love interest’s name sounds. The description is very melodramatic and over the top, this emphasizes the passion they feel. In closing the stanza they claim that the way they are feeling is like a spell. This once again suggests that it is beyond their control and that it is something that is being done unto them rather than an experience they are necessarily enjoying.Throughout the poem, there are a number of words that reference the physical body. These include “flesh,”“bones”“fingers,”“skull” and “blood.” While Duffy’s speaker might be romanticizing the physical parts of her relationship, she accepts what death will bring. She understands fully that every physical piece of her lover’s body, and her own body, will eventually be reduced to “brittle things.”