What the exam asks
When you use Duffy’s poetry in Paper 2 (closed book, 25 marks), you should pair two or three poems from the collection with another literary work to answer a general question on authorial choices such as voice, objects as symbols, structure or endings. Under Criterion B1 (5 marks), you must analyse and evaluate both small-scale language features and broader choices like stanza form and persona. Under Criterion B2 (5 marks), you evaluate how similarities and differences between the works sharpen your reading of both. Because ‘Warming Her Pearls’ is 24 lines long, the entire poem also fits the 40-line extract limit for the individual oral, or it can anchor an HL essay on how Duffy voices marginalized speakers across her work.
Core ideas
Form, structure and enjambment
Duffy writes the poem as a dramatic monologue in six unrhymed quatrains (four-line stanzas). The neat, even shape on the page matches the strict timetable and outward obedience of a lady’s maid in a grand house of an earlier century (the carriage and the Yellow Room date it). Against that visual order, Duffy uses enjambment—sentences running over line endings and even across stanza breaks (between stanzas 1 and 2, and stanzas 5 and 6). The maid’s body is confined by her routine, yet her private thoughts and desires refuse to stay inside the boundaries set for her.
Persona and the unspoken
The speaker is a servant tasked with wearing her mistress’s pearl necklace all day so the stones do not feel cold against the lady’s skin at night. Across all six stanzas, the maid never speaks a word aloud to her mistress. Her agency exists entirely in her mind and senses: while her hands perform submissive duties, her imagination claims an intense, private intimacy with the woman she serves.
Antithesis and the symbol of the pearls
Duffy structures the poem around a sustained antithesis (a direct contrast of ideas) between the two women, mediated by the symbol of the pearls:
| Dimension | The Mistress | The Maid | Effect on meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Temperature | Cool, pale, fanned | Warm, giving off “slow heat”, burning | Class privilege appears detached and cold; labour and desire are bodily and hot. |
| Space | “the Yellow Room”, carriages, ballrooms | “my attic bed” | Vertical hierarchy places the servant out of sight under the roof. |
| Scent & touch | “French perfume”, “silk / or taffeta” | “faint, persistent scent”, naked skin | Purchased luxury tries to mask the physical human labour underneath it. |
| The Pearls | “her jewels”, “her milky stones” | “her rope” | For the mistress, an ornament of wealth; for the maid, both a badge of servitude and a link to her beloved. |