Taken from Carol Ann Duffy's book entitled _Rapture_. # _Forest_ There were flowers at the edge of the forest, cupping the last of the light in their upturned petals. I followed you in, under the sighing, restless trees and my whole life vanished. The moon tossed down its shimmering cloth. We undressed, then dressed again in the gowns of the moon. We knelt in the leaves, kissed, kissed; new words rustled nearby and we swooned. Didn’t we? And didn’t I see you rise again and go deeper into the woods and follow you still, till even my childhood shrank to a glow-worm of light where those flowers darkened and closed. Thorns on my breast, rain in my mouth, loam on my bare feet, rough bark grazing my back, I moaned for them all. You stood, waist deep, in a stream, pulling me in, so I swam. You were the water, the wind in the branches wringing their hands, the heavy, wet perfume of soil. I am there now, lost in the forest, dwarfed by the giant trees. Find me.                                                                         CAROL ANN DUFFY # Explanation Rich, sensory, and layered with meaning. Here's a close reading: --- **Title & Context** This reads as a love poem — but the love described is not domestic or comfortable. It is overwhelming, consuming, and ultimately disorienting. Duffy is one of Britain's finest poets of desire and identity, and this poem sits squarely in that tradition. The forest is both literal and entirely symbolic. --- **The Opening — The Threshold** _"There were flowers at the edge of the forest, cupping the last of the light in their upturned petals."_ The poem opens at a threshold — the edge between the known world and the unknown. The flowers cupping the last light are beautiful but also valedictory: this is the final moment of clarity before something irreversible begins. The speaker is still in the ordinary world, but only just. _"I followed you in"_ — three words that carry the whole weight of voluntary surrender. Nobody pushed her. She chose this. --- **The Middle — Transformation** _"My whole life vanished."_ Blunt, declarative, and placed with devastating economy after the long opening sentence. Falling in love — real love — erases the previous self. Duffy doesn't romanticise this; she states it plainly. The moon imagery — _"gowns of the moon"_ — transforms the lovers into something otherworldly, mythic. They are no longer quite human. The kneeling suggests reverence, even worship. _"New words rustled nearby"_ is exquisite: love creates a new private language, and here even that language is not yet fully formed — it rustles, barely audible, just out of reach. _"Didn't we? And didn't I see you..."_ — the questioning tone is crucial. Memory and reality begin to blur. Was any of this real? The poem starts to destabilise itself from within. _"Till even my childhood shrank to a glow-worm of light"_ — this is the poem's most vertiginous image. The speaker has gone so deep into this love that her entire previous existence — including her childhood self — has receded to almost nothing. A glow-worm: still there, but tiny, cold, barely visible. --- **The Physicality** _"Thorns on my breast, rain in my mouth, loam on my bare feet, rough bark grazing my back, I moaned for them all."_ This is the most sensually intense passage in the poem. The list of physical sensations — thorns, rain, soil, bark — blurs the boundary between pain and pleasure, between the body and the natural world. To moan _for_ all of these things is to desire them, to welcome them. The beloved has dissolved into nature itself; loving them means loving the whole living world they have become. _"You were the water, the wind in the branches wringing their hands, the heavy, wet perfume of soil."_ The beloved is no longer a person. They have become elemental — water, wind, earth. This is both transcendent and frightening. You cannot hold water. You cannot embrace the wind. --- **The Ending** _"I am there now, lost in the forest, dwarfed by the giant trees. Find me."_ The poem ends in the present tense — she is still there, still lost. The final two words are the whole emotional heart of the poem: a plea, a cry, possibly even an accusation. _Find me._ She followed willingly, surrendered completely, lost herself entirely — and now waits to be found by the very person who led her in. There is ambiguity in that ending. Is it addressed to the beloved — come back and find me? Or is it addressed to herself — the self she lost along the way? Or to the reader — witness what love has done? --- **Broader Themes** The poem speaks to the way profound love dismantles identity. Duffy doesn't frame this as purely tragic or purely ecstatic — it is both simultaneously. The forest is the unconscious, the unknown, the place beyond self-possession. Following someone you love into it is an act of courage and of recklessness in equal measure. There's also an interesting resonance with the ideas you've been exploring — the forest as a place where the human self becomes smaller, more porous, more entangled with the living world. Kimmerer would perhaps recognise something in that dissolution — not as loss, but as a different kind of knowing.