What the exam asks
- Paper 2 (comparative essay, 25 marks): You write a closed-book essay comparing two literary works you have studied, answering one of four general questions. To reach the top bands in Criterion A (knowledge, understanding and interpretation, 5 marks), Criterion B1 (analysis and evaluation of textual features and/or authorial choices, 5 marks) and Criterion B2 (comparative analysis, 5 marks), aim to pair ‘Medusa’ with at least one other Duffy poem (such as ‘Havisham’ or ‘Mrs Midas’) to show knowledge of the collection as a whole work, and compare Duffy’s choices with those in a second literary work.
- Individual oral (40 marks): You examine how a global issue is presented in a 40-line extract from Duffy and a non-literary extract from a body of work, linking your close reading to Duffy’s wider collection (Criterion A and Criterion B). Because ‘Medusa’ is 42 lines long, you must select a continuous extract of up to 40 lines (such as lines 1–40, which is stanzas 1–6 and the first five lines of stanza 7, or lines 6–42, which is stanzas 2–7 and the final line).
- HL essay (20 marks): You can include ‘Medusa’ among several poems in a 1,200–1,500-word formal essay investigating a broad line of inquiry across Duffy’s poetry (for example, how Duffy uses mythic and fictional personas to expose the destructive effects of male betrayal).
Core ideas
Dramatic monologue and mythic revision
In Greek myth, Medusa is a Gorgon with living snakes for hair whose gaze petrifies anyone who looks at her, until the hero Perseus uses a mirrored shield to approach and behead her. Duffy’s broader authorial choice is to use the dramatic monologue—a poem spoken by a single character who is not the poet, addressing a silent listener—to turn a curse laid on her from outside into something that grows from inside her: a feeling. The silent addressee (‘you’) is a faithless lover who merges with Perseus in the final stanza. By making jealousy the force that mutates the speaker’s body, Duffy invites both terror at what Medusa does and sympathy for what she suffers.
Stanza structure and escalation
The poem is built from seven stanzas—an opening five-line stanza (quintain) followed by six six-line stanzas (sestets)—and concludes with an isolated single-line stanza (42 lines in total). Across this architecture, Duffy uses structural escalation (a steady increase in scale, intensity, and violence) to enact the speaker’s growing rage:
| Stanza(s) | Focus and structural movement | Key shift in gaze or tone |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Internal feeling mutates the speaker’s head, breath, mouth, and eyes. | Moves from private thought to the direct challenge: ‘Are you terrified?’ |
| 3 | The volta (turn in thought) across the stanza break: command, confession of love, and fear of betrayal. | Logical conclusion of possessive jealousy: turning the lover to ‘stone’. |
| 4–5 | The catalogue of petrifications in the outside world, rising in size and domestic violence. | Verbs of looking intensify from ‘I glanced’ (st. 4) to ‘I looked’ (st. 5). |
| 6 | The climax of the gaze: looking into the mirror and at a dragon. | The verb intensifies to ‘I stared’; self-recognition as ‘a Gorgon’. |
| 7 + final line | The arrival of the armoured lover/hero and the final nostalgic questions. | Shifts from epic volcano to broken vulnerability, then the ambiguous final command/plea. |