Selling Manhattan

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

The form of “Selling Manhattan” appears to frustrate definition, much less analysis. The poem is divided into seven irregular stanzas. Most are quintains, or stanzas with five lines, but the poem opens with a quatrain (four lines) set in italics to mark it as the interior thoughts of the Dutch settlers; there is also a stanza with a single line; and the poem closes with a tercet, a stanza with three lines. Each of the stanzas closes with an end-punctuation, although within each quintain are examples of enjambment, that is, a line that does not close with a comma or a period and thus moves directly into the next line.

Thus, the form seems formless. But that appears to be the point. Abandoning as predictive and intrusive the percussive beat of rhythm and the insistent sonic impact of rhyme, the poem captures a feeling of collision in its form that, in turn, suggests the collision of the cultures that is at the heart of the negotiation for Manhattan.

In addition, the carefully-choreographed open form allows the recitation to fit the growing bleakness of the poem. In many ways, the poem is an elegy for the earth itself. Regimented form would not transmit that feeling of loss and sorrow. In this way, the poem perfectly fits the emotions it is conveying. For instance, Stanza 6 is a single line—but that line is the poem’s troubling tipping point, the moment when the speaker acknowledges the inevitability of the passing of Indigenous cultures, whose spirits will now become part of nature.

Meter

In keeping with Duffy’s credo that poets accept the challenge of using form to recreate feeling, rather than crafting poems that follow the dictates of inherited convention and traditional prosody, the poem resists traditional metrical patterns.

Each line is constructed around the feeling being expressed. Rather than relying on the patterning of words into regular beats, the poem uses an intricate mash of long vowels, sibilant s’s, and guttural hard consonants (particularly g’s and p’s) to give the poem its sense of movement. Recitation relies on tapping into the feelings of the narrative itself. The opening quatrain, for instance, is brusque, chopped, with a pattern of staccato g’s, b’s, and d’s, like the hard rhythm of gunfire itself, the soundtrack of the invading Europeans.

To capture the meditative voice of the plural speaker coming to terms with the end of their culture and with the doom of the earth itself, meter, with its indifferent assertion of beat, would only undercut that feeling of loss and sorrow.

In rejecting the percussive pattern of meter, the poem allows for dramatic recitation, allows for the reader sensitive to the feelings of the speaker to give each line its individual pattern, its sonic drama of syllables. This gives the recitation of the poem an individual quality, like the ab-lib performance of a jazz score.

Voice

That two voices share the narrative line of “Selling Manhattan” is by itself hardly remarkable. Many poems shift between voices as a way to create suspense, compel action, and develop irony. What is remarkable here is that neither voice that sustains the poem—the harsh and racist language of the Dutch settlers or the evocative, elegiac choral voice of the Lenape struggling to come to terms with the implication of their extinction—neither voice is a projection of Carol Ann Duffy herself, a Scottish-Irish woman born in the latter decades of the 20th century. Although Duffy could have rendered her poem’s two thematic arguments—the immortality of ethnic cleansing and the impact of industrialism on the earth—through her own voice, the poem elects to use voice to create character, much like a play.

The voice then is dramatic, revelatory of radically-different perceptions, radically-different cultures. Voice, then, represents Duffy’s investigation into how language, words themselves, can create personality, define character, and elicit emotions. In addition to her prolific work as a poet, children’s book author, and cultural essayist, Duffy has written extensively for the stage and has dabbled in amateur acting. As a child, she was enthralled by the powerful creation of character using only the devices of language that defined Shakespearean theater. This creation of two voices sustains that same dramatic energy; the poem could easily be staged.