Carol Ann Duffy's poem, "LiverPool Echo"?
I can't seem to find any meanings of lang,form+structure? i have about the cavern club in liverpool where the beatles performed and that the poem is most likely written to John Lennon i also have that Duffy thought the life+soul had gone out of Liverpool since JL died, anything would be a great help, please? x
Update:Liverpool Echo – Carol Ann Duffy
Pat Hodges kissed you once, although quite shy,
In sixty-two. Small crowds in Mathew Street
Endure rain for the echo of a beat,
As if nostalgia means you did not die.
Inside phone-booth loveless ladies cry
On Merseyside. Their faces show defeat.
An ancient jukebox blares out Ain’t She Sweet
In Liverpool, which cannot say goodbye.
Here everybody has an anecdote
Of how they met you, were the best of mates.
The seagulls circle round a ferry-boat
Out on the river, where it’s getting late.
Like litter on the water, people float
Outside the Cavern in the rain. And wait.
Comments
The Liverpool Echo is the name of the local newspaper in Liverpool. Here Duffy is playing on the name of the newspaper, saying that Liverpool is now (1980's - when the poem first appeared) a place full of echoes:- sounds that are not real sounds, just reverberations of sounds that happened some time in the past.
The poem is full of people who are fixated on the past, as if they had no present or future:
Inside the phone-booth loveless ladies cry
the ladies are looking for love; but they are not even real people, they are just voices on the other end of a phone line.
The people are like the seagulls who circle round the ferry boat (the seagulls are trying to scavenge from any scraps of food travelers on the ferry might drop, much the way that the people in the city are trying to scavenge scraps from a long-past history).
It's 'getting late' on the river, because Liverpool's time is already past.
And so on, and so on: this is utterly mechanical poetry-by-numbers. (Perhaps Duffy intended her poetic technique to be tired and predictable - like the Liverpuddlians lives).
The important thing to notice about this poem is how it starts with a reference to Pat Hodges.
Pat Hodges was the most famous victim who escaped the Moors Murderers - Myra Hindley and Ian Brady.
The people who live in Liverpool are trying to resurrect the past, because they think that the past is a better, safer, place to live in. (Even the Beatles song mentioned by name - Ain't She Sweet - is a song the Silver Beetles recorded before they became the Beatles).
But for Pat Hodges the 1960's was not a time to be young, sheltered, and happy (Pat narrowly missed being brutally murdered and buried in a shallow grave).
Carol is reminding us that the past might seem snug and cosy, but wasn't so at the time.
Poem is good. Very publishable . whome it was written about I don't know. It could even be a personal poem with allusions and methaphors, but it does make sense.
Perhaps posting the poem would help?
thanks for the answers.