Explore how Carol Ann Duffy presents the fragility of love in ‘Betrothal’, and make connections with one or two other poems from your collection.

Duffy also presents the fragility of love through her choice of form. ‘You’ is a Shakespearean sonnet, comprised of four quatrains and a rhyming couplet, which is a traditional poetic choice when presenting love. However, Duffy’s use of this is almost oxymoronic- the love that she is portraying is still just lust, and at the beginning of the poem she is convinced that she will never have a relationship with her lover. Furthermore, the dark and animalistic tone of Duffy’s writing contrasts with the expected tropes of love, which is usually presented with light and dream-like lexical and structural choices. In this way, the sonnet form of ‘You’ could be interpreted as Duffy’s defiant rejection of how the ideal love is seen, condemning the notions of harmony and calm infatuation from inside this systematic arrangement, but also the idea that a love that started as a fragile need for touch is probably going to end in the same manner. 
Additionally, ‘Betrothal’ features 9 stanzas of 4 lines, the final line beginning with the repeated imperative “make me…”, to reinforce the idea that Duffy is desperate for her lover to prove that they are invested in the relationship. Throughout ‘Rapture’, the lover is referred to with the second person plural “you”, making it a more relatable text for anyone who had been in a relationship before, but Duffy is widely known to be a lesbian, so many readers may choose to read these poems with a homosexual overtone. Thirdly, ‘Ithaca’ features five quintets. The relationship between the number of stanzas and the number of lines gives the poem a thoughtful, calculated atmosphere, representing that Duffy is slowly thinking over the problems in her relationship, and is attempting to rationalise. Also, this poem has the longest stanzas of the three, representing that the relationship has been going on for longer now, so that Duffy has more to say about it- and perhaps better understands her own feelings (as the reader does) in the context of what has occurred before. The fragility of the love she feels is finally becoming clear to her.