Summary
Mrs Midas dreams that she gave birth to a son, but when he was born he was already golden. In the dream, her breastfeeding milk burns. She wakes up the next day to see the sunlight coming in through the window.
Analysis
The stanza opens with the lines “And who, when it comes to the crunch, can live / with a heart of gold?” (Lines 43-44). This is a pun on the phrase “heart of gold,” which is an idiom for a kind and generous disposition. In this case, Mrs Midas’s husband would literally turn a heart to gold. Symbolically, his wish was a product not of his “heart of gold,” but of his selfishness and greed. The line contains another idiom: “when it comes to the crunch” is a British idiom that refers to a very important or difficult point in a situation, in which a person must make a key decision on how to progress. This line symbolizes a turning point in the poem: Mrs Midas has come to terms with the reality of her husband’s wish and must decide how to deal with the situation. Her dream represents her recognizing that the future she had envisioned with her husband—having a child and building a family—is no longer possible. The “streaming sun” to which she wakes up represents her seeing her future and her husband in a new light.
Duffy then draws out the disturbing implications of the joke about a “heart of gold” by turning to Mrs Midas’s dream, which involves her giving birth to a golden child. Mrs Midas envisions the child with “amber eyes / holding their pupils like flies,” creating an internal rhyme and a disturbing image to describe the golden baby’s appearance. Additionally, the line carries another symbol: flies that are permanently caught in amber can be very valuable, like gold, but this dream converts them into something horrific by using them to describe a baby’s eyes, referencing the horrific consequences of turning everything into gold. The description of Mrs Midas “dream milk / burn[ing] in [her] breasts” and the “streaming sun” invoke the image of bright gold turning hot in the sunlight, symbolizing how gold has invaded Mrs Midas’s life and destroyed her future, due to her husband.
