Thetis is the mother of Achilles. She is a water nymph, with the ability to shape shift into anything.She is married to Peleus, because an old sea god told him to go and find the nymph while she was asleep and tie her down to stop her from changing form. When he succeeded in this task, Thetis agreed to marry him. The Structure:
Thetis is divided into eight different stanzas, each representing a form she took whilst shape shifting. All stanzas are a regular length of six lines each.
Close Reading:
- "I shrank myself/ to the size of a bird in the hand/ of a man." - Thetis starts by shape shifting into something small. The bird is "sweet" and could symbolise her innocence and naivety towards the task Peleus had been given.
- "I felt the squeeze of his fist." - the man is holding her down
, restricting her.
She continues to be a bird, but feels her wings "clipped by the squint of a crossbow's eye."- her movement is consistently obstructed by the man, that uses physical abuse to subdue her.
- "So I shopped for a suitable shape./ Size 8." - the poem is put in a modern context by showing what, nowadays, society calls a suitable shape. Duffy is proposing that it is not just men that try to tell women what is the right thing to do, but everyone else as well.
- "Snake./ Big Mistake./ Coiled in my charmer's lap,/ I felt the grasp of his strangler's clasp/ at my nape." - this section is referring back to the original mythology. One of the shapes Thetis took was a serpent. This stanza has the rhyme scheme of A, B, B, C, C, A, which could suggest the cycle that no shape is right. No matter what shape Thetis takes on, she will always be strangled by the man. The use of minor sentences also adds emphasis.
- The next stanza highlights when Thetis transforms into a lioness. "Next I was a roar, claw, 50 lb paw" Again, this shape isn't satisfactory, the man is still constricting her. "the guy in the grass with the gun" Even as a lioness, the most powerful animal in the jungle she is unable to escape the man's clutches - her transformations grow bigger and bigger, from a bird to a lion.
- The next two stanza list more attempts to change her nature. "Mermain, me, big fish, eel, dolphin", "raccoon, skunk, stoat."-In the penultimate stanza, Thetis becomes intangible things: "I was wind, I was gas, I was all hot air."Still, the man cuts her down.
- The final stanza shows her transformation into "flame". This was her last attempt, before she relented and let Peleus marry her.
Themes
"I changed, I learned" Carol Ann Duffy is showing how it must always be the woman who changes and she should always obey a man's orders. She is showing how women, no matter how strong, there will always be a man that is strong.
The whole point of carol ann duffys poetry is to liberate woman,Thetis says she ‘learned’ and ‘turned inside out’. It is the momentous transformation of childbirth that changes Thetis to a different sort of woman. A mother. This gives her strength no one can tell her what to do with her child, she has the ability to create life that is power with itself x
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