Contextual stuff

According to legend, Faust is an ambitious scholar who pursues all of the normal avenues of exploration but is left unsatisfied despite his achievements in law, philosophy and medicine. In order to gain his heart's desires Faust sells his soul to the devil. Faust is obsessed by a desire for power and his arrogance leads him to believe that the pact will make him omnipotent. After twenty four years of unrivalled power, influence and experience, the devil returns to claim Faust's soul. The most famous re-tellings of the story are the eponymous plays Faust by Goethe and Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.

Theme

Marriage, materialism, selfishness, break-up of a relationship.

Language/imagery

The authoritative first person voice of the speaker is immediately established in the opening statement: ‘First things first – I married Faust’.  The speaker goes on to relay the couple’s relationship using an asyndetic list: ‘shacked up, split up, made up, hitched up…’ This perhaps indicates the speed of their relationship, but also begins to highlight the Fausts’ materialistic lifestyle and lack of emotional attachments: ‘No kids. Two towelled bathrobes.’

Towards the end of the stanza, minor sentences are isolated using caesura to accentuate the couple’s independence: ‘Hers. His.’ More apparent here is the reversal of the traditional order of the gendered nouns and the foregrounding of the female position.

The fast paced second stanza reflects their quick success in the material world and the couple’s immersion in a consumerist society: ‘Fast cars. A boat with sails.’  As the lavish lifestyle progresses, Faust’s character begins to decline: ‘Faust’s face was greedy, slightly mad’.       

Now the distance between the couple increases as reflected in the changing pronouns: ‘we worked… He went to whores, I went to yoga’. This change in perspective is supported by the alternate rhyme scheme, emphasising the differing activities they now enjoy.  As the following stanza suggests, these separate lifestyles continue and the image of Faust as an insatiable, hedonist is established: ‘take his lust to Soho in a cab’.  The end focus on the verb ‘feast’ connotes extravagance and serves to contrast with Mrs Faust’s later admission: ‘hadn’t eaten’.  

As Faust acquires more wealth, so he becomes more avaricious and takes greater risks, until he seeks the final transgression: a pact with the devil.  Mrs Faust returns home one night to the smell of cigar smoke, ‘hellish, oddly sexy’. The cigar is phallic, a symbol of male power and represents an environment she is excluded from ‘not allowed’.         

Faust now has unlimited earthly power captured in the carnal metaphor: ‘the world, as Faust said, spread its legs’, which also suggests Faust’s contempt for women and his ability to dominate them.  After succeeding in a political career and business career, the humorous rhetorical question is posed: ‘Enough?’ before he progresses into a religious career, starting near the top of the hierarchy: ‘Cardinal, Pop. This childish attitude governs the stanza as Faust ‘lunches’ before walking on the moon and lights ‘a fat Havana on the sun’.  This soon progresses to a more sinister mood, as the opposing tones are separated by a stanza break, but linked by a half-rhyme: ‘sun/hunch’.

Faust sees the market for ‘smart bombs’ and Duffy emphasises what he is doing by rhyming ‘harms’ and ‘arms’.  As he himself defies nature, Faust is also lured to the controversial ‘cloned sheep’.  The overall picture in this stanza is of a man who has too much money and power and doesn’t know what to do with it, much like Marlowe’s protagonist. This is compounded by the fact that he cannot find love and is reduced to internet dating: ‘surfed the net for like minded Bo-Peep’.

Unlike her husband, Mrs Faust uses the money, power and influence to go her ‘own sweet way’.  Her pleasures are to do with either external appearance or becoming more aware of the world through travel. Having her ‘breasts enlarged’, her ‘buttocks tightened’ might be argued to be superficial interests but she suggests that her foreign travel allowed her to return ‘enlightened’.  Duffy is perhaps being ironic here, but, nevertheless, we are offered a less threatening response to money and power.

Structure

Duffy's consistent use of nine line stanzas implies Faust is also consistent and unwilling to change. The poem rushes along in free verse like the Fausts' fast living.

Links to other poems

'Mrs Midas' is also about materialism; compare Quasimodo’s…