1. Carol Ann Duffy
The Biographer

2. Who do you admire? Which famous person would you like to meet?
Whose home would you love to look around?
Whose approval would you like to win?

3. The Biographer

4. The Biographer Whose is the poetic voice in this poem?
The biographer is a homodiegetic narrator and the poem is a dramatic monologue, a style that was popular in Victorian poetry. Robert Browning used this prolifically in his poetry.

5. Are you listening?
What is the effect of using the second person pronoun, the “you”? How does it make you feel that the biographer stands at “your desk”, “slept alone in your bed”, looks into “your mirrors”?
What does he want from you?

6. The Biographer
What do we learn about the person that the biographer is addressing?
In the first verse what is the tone and who is the focus?
Are there any phonaesthetic patterns in sound?

7. “the end of a fire” How does the tone change in the second verse?
What do you learn about the narrator?
How might the line, “the end of a fire going out in the grate”, have metaphorical significance?

8. “the meagre shadow I cast”
In the third verse, the biographer talks a little of the writer’s voice. This may be metaphorical, of his own search for a literary voice. How do you think he feels when “the faces you wrote/leer and gape and plead at my feet”?
How is alliteration used in this verse and at the beginning of the fourth verse?
Explain the last two lines of verse three.

9. “In all of your mirrors my face.”
The last verse begins with a list with alliteration. Then every line decreases in length until the repetition of “I print it out”. What is the effect of this?
How does the biographer use the third person possessive pronoun “its” to refer to his eyes, cheekbones and smile? How does he feel about himself and his life?

10. Intriguingly, in both a tentative list of poems to be in “Mean Time” and in the transcript of “Mean Time” itself, “The Biographer” was not listed. This means that the poem was added in very late, if not last minute. What made Duffy (or her editor) decide to put in the poem at such a late point?
biographer/