Elvis's Twin Sister Essay Questions

Discuss the passage "Gregorian chant/drifts out across the herbs/Pascha nostrum immolatus est..."

A Gregorian chant is a traditional form of Christian liturgical music. At first glance, this detail may seem unremarkable, given the religious setting of the poem. However, this passage speaks to the relationship between the speaker and her brother, both because of the music itself and because of the lyrics Duffy has chosen to quote. The presence of music in her convent suggests that the lives she and her brother have chosen bear unexpected similarities to one another, since both include musical and creative expression. Meanwhile, the hymn itself refers to Christ's self-sacrifice and thus suggests that Elvis himself may be a Christ figure, having sacrificed himself for the sake of music.

Analyze the diction of "Elvis's Twin Sister."

This poem employs a surprising combination of diction from two distinct cultural and linguistic areas: that of the American South, and that of the Catholic Church. This is made clear from the poem's first line, in which the speaker addresses the readers with "y'all," a Southern term, before referencing her life in the "convent," a religious one. At times a single word will span both realms—the word "lawdy," in the poem's final stanza, has a religious meaning but is conveyed in a Southern dialect. This juxtaposition of two usually separate types of diction reflects the juxtaposition between the speaker, in her religious vocation, and her brother, whose songs drew from Southern and African American musical traditions. At the same time, the intertwining of the two lexicons speaks to the inextricability of the two siblings.