Text by Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy is considered to be one of the most significant contemporary

British writers. She is recognized for her straightforward, unrelenting approach
to gender issues. Text’ by Carol Ann Duffy is all about the text messages we
type on our mobile phones. This short poem belongs to her poetry collection,
“Rapture” (2005). The former poet laureate meditates on the activity of texting
and shares her thoughts regarding it in this poem. She is actually deliberating
over the change in our mode of communication.

According to Duffy, texting or sending short messages using our mobile

devices has become a popular mode of conversation between friends and
family members. The poem makes it clear that the poetess also uses it. But she
is not happy with such a soundless conversation. Carol Ann Duffy discusses
how she feels while texting her dear ones in her poem, ‘Text’. At the beginning
of the poem, the poetess reads some messages on her mobile phone
repetitively. While reading those text messages she feels that the process of
sending and receiving messages is somehow mechanical. The message which
she receives on her phone is like a note in a “broken chord”. She can’t even
imagine the person who is actually sending those messages to her. As a result,
she feels dejected for the mental distance, texting has created in her world.

Carol Ann Duffy directly makes her idea clear to the readers. She is talking
about text messaging commonly known as text. In our modern world, we treat
our mobile phones as our pets. Like us, she tends to her phone as “an injured
bird”. Thereafter she refers to the habit of texting which has become an
inseparable part of our lives. We spend long hours on this medium of short
conversation and often text our “significant words” to our dear ones.

Duffy shares her habit of texting and what she feels about it, in the next four
lines of ‘Text’. The poetess reads the messages sent by one of her close friends
repetitively. She tries to find some adorable notes in those messages. But
somehow this process seems meaningless to her. The format of such kind of
communication leaves her with a sense of loneliness. At the time of texting,
she apparently feels to be with someone. But in reality, she sees some words
on her screen without getting the sound of the sender. It is not the words but
the sound in a person’s words which makes them so dear to us.

After failing to feel the auditory aspects of texting Carol Ann Duffy tries to
imagine the visual aspects of the sender. She says, “I try to picture your
hands,/ their image is blurred.” Her statement makes it clear she also fails this
time. Being an instrumental mode of communication, it is never possible to
picture the person who sends messages to the poetess.

At last, the poetess utters a harsh reality. She tells the readers, “Nothing my
thumbs press/ will ever be heard.” It is true that messaging being a visual
mechanism of communication can’t deliver our feelings to a person. It just
sends our codified words nothing else.