Dream of a Lost Friend Essay

How does Duffy powerfully portray the experience of losing a friend in Dream of a Lost Friend? In this verse form, Duffy explores how the tragic loss of a pixilated friend affects the lamenter, and powerfully portrays the implications of their death using imagery, structure and emotive language. She touches upon apiece of the 5 stages of grief and bereavement, and conveys the psychological treat of each of these defense mechanism, Anger, Guilt, Depression and Acceptance. Denial is the first stage of grief, in which the mourner refuses to believe that their loss is a reality.Duffy is effective in portraying how this makes the experience of losing a friend so powerful, as she shows Firstly, the title suggests that Duffy refuses to accept her friends death, as she refers to her as disjointed, suggesting that like the word lost connotes, the departed may feel a chance of being found again. Duffy constantly refers to oxymorons and frigids through the poem such as prayers to Chemi stry.This suggests again a hysteric confusion everywhere her death, which clash, and reveals her contrasting estimations which could reflect her trying to accept this death whilst still denying it. Duffy in like manner searches for found, the opposite to the lost in the title, but she never mentions it, as if no amount of opposite opposites leave behind help her find the opposite of this death. Duffy also conveys the notion of denial through the sentence, its only a dreamonly a bad dream. This repetition of the motif of dreaming shows an obsession with the imagination of this death being part of a dream.Dreams shake off connotations of peace and happiness, as if she is convincing herself that her friend is experiencing some escapism from the unhinge of her disease, as Duffy wants to believe that this is for the best. As dreams are from the lexicon of sleep, it is as if she wants to prove that she will wake up.That this is just a brief period of detachment from the human b efore she comes back, ascertaining the truth that denial is a major part of bereavement. The repetition of its only a dream becomes like a mantra, which is a technique used to create transformation, as Duffy tries convince herself. A mantra is also reminiscent of childhood, like a playground rhyme. This proves that these emotions stir up a sense of being lost, and re spoting to a time of purity and comfort, when accepting becomes too difficult, the mourner morphs into their childhood self. This sense of being lost could also refer to the poem title, as it could beapplicable to the mourner as well, as they are too a lost friend.This idea of being one and the same as the deceased suggests that still believe themselves as equal, living entities, and that death does not separate them. Duffy also explains the process of denial through the chosen structure for the poem juxtaposing the journey of grief. With grief, you bewilder with a strong sense of denial and conclude the worst of the contiguous mourning with acceptance of their death. However, this poem starts with the personal pronoun of you and travels through each other party/person before reaching you once more. Duffy starts the first stanza with You, the fleck with We, the next with the idea of Them, then I and finally You.This proves that through Duffys structure, she shows the powerful experience of grief, and shows that she always puts her friend first, then their time together. Her acrimony memories of those who dont understand are soon swept off by the thought of herself and how important her friend was to her, concluding with You. This could be taken to show that Duffy is stating that she never really completed the journey of bereavement, but is alternatively stuck in a cyclical roundabout that always comes back to the thought of her friend. This shows how she mentally is determined to bring her back, but the fact that this journey is forever and a day recurring proves that this will never hap pen.The next stage of bereavement is Anger. sing Ann Duffy expresses her anger in the third stanza and emphatically emphasises the powerful effect this has as one repercussion of losing a friend. She shows how death can make you turn against those closest to you. She almost implies Some of our best friends nurture a virus, an idle, charmed, resolute enemy, and it dreams they are dead already. This suggests that Duffy makes dichotomy between herself and her friend against the outside world, including their other friends.The word our is placed first, as if to re-connect the bond between Duffy and the deceased, and so Duffy joins forces with the deceased against the world, as if they are to blame. Then the second half of the sentence starts with they, as if they should always come second, and are to blame. The use of these pronouns separates them into two groups, and implies that Duffy is angry at the rest of the world for taking away her friend.