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Stafford Afternoons - Carol Ann Duffy
Summary
How many times in our childhoods are we asked the question: ‘Where are you going?’ And
here in Carol Ann Duffy’s evocative recollection of an afternoon adventure, we re-enter the
liberating, yet unsettling territory of childhood
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Structure
● Six stanzas
● Written in quatrains
● No rhyme scheme
● The poem tells the story of innocence being lost and the stanzas get progressively
darker as we read it- the first three are very positive images of childhood while the
final three are more negative and dark
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Parenthesis
This line suggests that the persona is imagining fantasies of herself and the horse
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● ‘I knew it was dangerous’
Statement
Suggests the persona was aware that what they were doing was wrong but did it
anyways-an act of childhood curiosity?
● ‘The way the trees
drew sly faces from light and shade, the wood
let out its sticky breath on the back of my neck,
and flowering nettles gathered spit in their throats
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The list also suggests that there are countless or many terrible things in this wood,
another possible example of vivid imagination
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● ‘Touch’
Imperative and italics
This suggests that another person is talking to the persona
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● ‘birds, a distant lawnmower,
his hoarse, frightful endearments’
Tripling and enjambment
The persona is torn from her fantasies and imaginations back into reality
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‘Only there, the afternoons could suddenly pause’ (First line of poem)
‘and time fell from the sky like a red ball
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In the first line, time can ‘suddenly pause’ since she
was a child and got caught up in her own imagination
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Language and form
● ‘I looked up from lacing my shoe’
Suggests childhood and innocence since tying shoelaces feels like a significant event
to the persona
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Metaphor and foreshadowing
The ice-cream van dwindling away is a metaphor for growing up and leaving behind
your childhood; Duffy uses an ice-cream van since they have connotations of youth
and childhood
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Adjective
‘Strange’ suggests that the persona does not know this boy or that he is out of place
in the persona’s vivid imaginations
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● ‘The green silence gulped once and swallowed me whole
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● ‘The way the trees
drew sly faces from light and shade, the wood
let out its sticky breath on the back of my neck,
and flowering nettles gathered spit in their throats
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The personifications make it feel like the child is being watched and followed-possibly
stalked-by something inconspicuous and unknown
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● ‘long-haired man
who stood, legs apart,’
Connotations
The connotations of long hair are that this person is unkempt and unclean-possibly an
outcast to society
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‘Purple root’
Metaphor
This proves the fact that something sexual and perverted is happening
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‘ran all the way home’
Again brings the feeling of a fairytale or child’s story
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This could also suggest that the children are afraid and have ran away
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‘time fell from the sky like a red ball
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