Poems
Poem 4: 'Stealing'
Extract
The most unusual thing I ever stole? A snowman.
Midnight. He looked magnificent; a tall, white mute
beneath the winter moon.
Location
In the poem the identity and gender of the criminal are never revealed. The programme chooses to make the criminal male. This is an example of the difficulty of 'illustrating' a poem for film or TV. A poem allows the reader to make up their own pictures. The programme has to choose.
Summary
'Stealing' was written around a real incident, when Duffy was living in London and a snowman was stolen from a neighbour's garden. At the time the poet felt that this bizarre crime could only have taken place in the political climate of Mrs Thatcher's Conservative government, in a time of rising unemployment and lack of consideration on the part of those in power for those 'at the bottom of the heap'.
It is written in the voice of the thief, who could be either a girl or a boy, a man or a woman. Duffy sees the poem as a political poem, as a way of giving a voice to someone who in real life might not have the power to articulate their feelings. She uses her power as a poet to get the reader inside the mind of this outcast from society. The poem starts and finishes with a question addressed directly to the reader. It moves between a lyrical poetic speech, which might be the inner thoughts of the criminal - 'a mate / with a mind as cold as the slice of ice / within my own brain' and what might be their actual speech - 'I nicked a bust of Shakespeare once...'.
In places the poem reads like a movie - 'I watch my gloved hand twisting the doorknob' - and the poet works on creating the violence of the character's actions in the rhythms and sounds of the words on the page - 'I took a run / and booted him. Again. Again. My breath ripped out / in rags'.
The poem pinpoints with great compasssion the feelings of someone who may be unemployed or homeless and for whom the apparently pointless gesture of stealing a snowman becomes a bid for celebrity, a desire to impress themselves upon a world that seems to have left them behind.
What Carol Ann Duffy Said
'I think that ordinary speech is intensely poetic...
'The speaker is the star of his or her own movie, and that's all they have... that's where they're famous.
'I wrote the poem because it did happen and it obsessed me. I did think it was a wildly funny and original thing to do to steal a snowman because there was enough snow to make your own.'
Carol Ann Duffy - Passwords 1998
