Love
The narrators of the poems discuss love and analyze it from different perspectives and using different approaches. In some poems, love is perceived as being positive, something everyone most aspire to. This idea appears in the poem entitled "Ship’’ where even though the story is tragic in the sense it is not a happy ending, despite this, the narrator transmits the idea that she does not regret anything that happened and is happy she had the opportunity to feel love. In another poem entitled "Text’’, the narrator analyzes once more love, but this time from a more modern perspective and shows just how much love is affected by the modern technological advancements and how it is lost its meaning because of this.
Growing up
In the poem entitled "Little Red Cap’’ the main theme is growing up. The main character in the poem, a young girl, meets an older wolf who takes her into the woods and who helps her develop and grow into a woman. Growing up is associated with sexual experiences as well with literary ones and at the end of the experience the little girl ends up killing the man who helped her develop. The growing up process is thus described as being a rather violent one during which a person loses her or his innocence and ends up a completely different person.
Women and marriage
Another common theme is the idea that women should get married. This is the common theme in the poem entitled "Havisham’’ where the narrator analyzes the status of an old and single woman in society. From the poem, we can understand that the woman suffers because she is not married and wishes she would have someone near her. She feels incomplete because she is not married and she blames her former lovers for her current status. This poem is important because it shows how unmarried women were treated by the rest of the society and how their worth was calculated in connection with their marital status.
Loss
Loss is a prevalent theme throughout most of Duffy's work, most prominently shown in poems such as "Havisham," where the title character loses both her husband and her sanity. The loss she experiences devastates her and prevents her from being able to move on. Loss is also heavily portrayed in the title character of "Anne Hathaway"; however, unlike Havisham, she understands the loss she is experiencing and is coping with it in a much more healthy and adaptive way. She chooses to remember him however so that he may constantly live as long as she does and until she is also reduced to mere ashes. This proves the connection between the two as their love was so strong that Hathaway refuses to allow anything, even death, to come between their relationship. She has lost the physical being that was her husband, not the happiness that he brought her, showing a stark contrast between "Havisham" and "Hathaway".
