Literary Analysis of The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team by Carol Ann Duffy
... wife”. The narrator uses adjectives such as “whooped”, “fizzed” and “blew like Mick” which demonstrates the speaker’s energy and optimism and also creates an upbeat tone and pace for the poem. The second verse begins much like the first with the kind of facts which brought the narrator success in the “Top of the Form” game show. The facts the narrator talks about are all arbitrary and disconnected the kind of facts only useful for winning game shows. The speaker choice to use the verb “saluted” emphasises a visual image of the speaker’s success in the classroom and his respect for the teacher. The third verse opens with the alliteration of “Dave Dee Dozy…” which changes the pace of the poem slightly, while “Try me” changes the tone to a more competitive one. The speaker in this verse sets the past with use of specific objects and places. The “Gonk” which he won for winning the quiz show, “The badge. The tie” representative of his school uniform and “Churchill way” and “Nelson Avenue” represent places the narrator recalls from his childhood. The use of “Churchill” and Nelson” also shows the narrator was a conservative as they were both conservative leaders. Ending the third verse with “My Country” sums up what the third verse and whole poem depicts a place the speaker recalls and wishes to continue to live in. The narrator makes reference to “The paw prints of badgers and skunks in the mud” which represents him leaving his mark in 1964 and also is reference to a shoe craze of that era, where shoes had moulded shapes of various animal paw prints on the bottom of them that left marks in soft ground. The focus changes in the fourth verse from his reminiscence to feelings of exile and distance is his present day. The simile “I smiles as wide as a child on the way home from school” is a reference to the photographs published in newspapers of children that were missing, as they tended to be family photographs and therefore the children were often smiling. The speaker sees himself as a child who has gone missing, his journey “on the way h...