-The use of verbs such as “wheel’d”, “hiss’d” and “flew”, such rapid movement, while the noun “rapture” suggests the intense enjoyment of the boys skating on the lake.

-The natural world is represented in the poem, with “woodland pleasure”, and “leafless trees”, while the humans are also portrayed as animals. The skaters are all “shod with steel” like “untir’d” horses, chasing the “hunted hare”.

-There is imagery to do with sounds, the pack is “bellowing”, the icy crags “tinkled like iron”, there is an “alien sound/Of melancholy”.

Final words – “in the west/The orange sky of evening died away”, which suggests the vivid image of a sunset as we return to the warm glow of the evening.

The language is ominous, indicating darkness and tragedy – “tawny vapour”, “webby fold” and “waning taper”. Her whole world is covered in gloom.

“He – has fallen” is a euphemism to shield the widow from the harsh truth but the dashes represent her grief and inability to process the news of her husband’s death.

Pathetic fallacy of the “fog hangs thicker” shows her grief is settling in.

Final words – “new love that they would learn” shows the irony that he was looking forward to their new life together.  It heightens the tragedy and heartbreak of his death because they will never be together and rekindle their relationship.

Her collection The World’s Wife took characters from history, literature and mythology and gave them a female point of view, as a sister, a wife or a feminised version of a character. Carol Ann Duffy wrote Valentine after a radio producer asked her to write an original poem for St. Valentine's Day. Duffy likes to break conventions and in Valentine she is criticising society’s views of being materialistic. Duffy’s poem is reminiscent of metaphysical poets such as John Donne, who approached ordinary objects in original and surprising ways. The multilayered complexity of the onion represents a real relationship and is used as an extended metaphor throughout.

-‘I wander thro' each charter'd street, near where the charter'd Thames does flow’

-‘And mark in every face I meet marks of weakness, marks of woe’

-‘In every voice, in every ban, the mind-forg'd manacles I hear’

-‘How the Chimney-sweeper's cry, every blackning Church appalls’