Havisham is a poem written in 1998 by Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy, CBE, FRSL is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's poet laureate in May 2009...

. It responds to Charles Dickens'

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

 character Miss Havisham

Miss Havisham

Miss Havisham is a significant character in the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations . She is a wealthy spinster, who lives in her ruined mansion with her adopted daughter, Estella, whom she has sent to France, while she herself is described as looking like "the witch of the place."Although she...

from his novel Great Expectations

Great Expectations

Great Expectations is a novel by Charles Dickens. It was first published in serial form in the publication All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. It has been adapted for stage and screen over 250 times....

, looking at Havisham's mental and physical state many decades after the conclusion of Great Expectations, when the bride is in her old age. It expresses Havisham's anger at her fiancé and the bitter hatred of her traumatic wedding and the jilted state she has been left in. Duffy's use of language is very powerful and passionate. Throughout the poem the oxymorons like "Beloved sweetheart bastard" and "Love's hate" portrays the ambivalence and restless uncertainty of the character, while a sexual fantasy reveals both the unrequited love and the passion that remains within Havisham following the wedding, a devastation from which her heart has never recovered.

The Poem

Havisham

Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then

I haven't wished him dead. Prayed for it

so hard I've dark green pebbles for eyes,

ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with.
Spinster. I stink and remember. Whole days

in bed cawing Nooooo at the wall; the dress

yellowing, trembling if I open the wardrobe;

the slewed mirror, full-length, her, myself, who did this
to me? Puce curses that are sounds not words.

Some nights better, the lost body over me,

my fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear

then down till suddenly bite awake. Love's
hate behind a white veil; a red balloon bursting

in my face. Bang. I stabbed at a wedding cake.

Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon.

Don't think it's only the heart that b-b-b-breaks.
The poem is featured in the examining board AQA's English Literature Anthology

AQA Anthology

The AQA Anthology is a collection of poems and short texts which are studied in English schools for GCSE English and English Literature, produced by the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance...

 for its GCSE qualification in English Literature. It featured alongside works by Duffy, and three other contemporary writers: Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage CBE is a British poet, playwright, and novelist.-Life and career:Simon Armitage was born in Marsden, West Yorkshire. Armitage first studied at Colne Valley High School, Linthwaite, Huddersfield and went on to study geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic...

, Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...

 and Gillian Clarke

Gillian Clarke

Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet, playwright, editor, broadcaster, lecturer and translator from Welsh.-Life:Clarke was born in Cardiff and brought up in Cardiff and Penarth, though for part of the Second World War she was in Pembrokeshire...

.