What the exam asks
- Paper 2 (Comparative essay, 25 marks): You answer one of four general literary questions without the texts in front of you. When you use a poetry collection as one of your two works, you should discuss more than one poem to show knowledge of the whole work (Criterion A). For Criterion B1 (authorial choices, 5 marks) and Criterion B2 (comparative analysis, 5 marks), examiners reward essays that connect small-scale language features (such as asyndeton, puns and register shifts) to larger formal choices (such as dramatic monologue, stanza structure and endings).
- Individual oral (40 marks) and HL essay (20 marks): Because the entire poem is 28 lines long, it fits comfortably inside the 40-line limit for an oral extract. In an HL essay on Duffy’s collection, it anchors lines of inquiry into how Duffy subverts traditional artistic frames, gives voice to silenced figures, or uses flat declarative final lines.
Core ideas
Dramatic monologue and the reversed gaze
Traditionally, a poem about a painting—known as ekphrastic poetry—adopts the voice of the admiring viewer or the male artist looking at a silent female subject. Duffy turns this convention inside out through the dramatic monologue: a poem spoken entirely by an imagined persona (here, a working-class French model, paid in francs, posing for a Cubist painter, often associated by critics with Georges Braque’s Large Nude of 1907–08, though the poem does not give his surname or identify the painting).
By giving the sole voice to the model, Duffy reverses the direction of the gaze:
- The painter looks at the model to break her body into geometric shapes.
- The model looks right back at the painter, judging his technique, his distraction, his poverty and the wealthy buyers who will one day own the canvas.
Structure, economy and movement
Duffy builds the poem out of four regular seven-line stanzas (28 lines in total) of mostly unrhymed free verse. Visually on the page, each seven-line block resembles a rectangular canvas or frame. Inside those neat frames, however, Duffy uses constant enjambment (running sentences across line and stanza breaks) and abrupt mid-line full stops (caesura) to create the rhythm of a working woman thinking on her feet while holding a cold, tiring pose.
| Stanza | Focus of the speaker’s monologue | Shift in power and perspective |
|---|---|---|
| Stanza 1 (ll. 1–7) | The six-hour pose for a few francs; the painter reducing her body to parts; the future of the painting in museums. | Moves from physical cold and economic need to mocking irony directed at wealthy art buyers. |
| Stanza 2 (ll. 8–14) | The painter’s concern with volume, space and her weight; her focus on the next meal and the cold studio; the Queen of England’s imagined praise. | The model contrasts high-art theory and royal approval with physical hunger and cold. |
| Stanza 3 (ll. 15–21) | His reputation as a genius; his lapse in concentration and sexual arousal; his brushwork; their shared poverty in the studio. | She sees through his desire, diminishes him physically, and equates his painting with her sex work. |
| Stanza 4 (ll. 22–28) | Her scepticism towards artists; her off-duty life in bars; the finished canvas and her pay; her final verdict. | She steps out of the frame, reclaims her bodily appetite, and separates her true self from the painted object. |