Mrs Sisyphus

That's him pushing the stone up the hill, the jerk.
I call it a stone — it's nearer the size of a kirk.
When he first started out, it just used to irk,
but now its incenses me, and him, the absolute berk.
I could do something vicious to him with a dirk.

Think of the perks, he says
What use is a perk, I shriek,
when you haven't the time to pop open a cork
or go for so much as a walk in the park?
He's a dork.
Folks flock from miles around just to gawk.
They think it's a quirk,
a bit of a lark.
A load of old bollocks is nearer the mark.
He might as well bark
at the moon —
that feckin' stone's no sooner up
than it's rolling back
all the way down.
And what does he say?
Mustn't shirk —
keen as a hawk,
lean as a shark
Mustn't shirk!
But I lie alone in the dark,
feeling like Noah's wife did
when he hammered away at the Ark;
like Frau Johann Sebastian Bach.
My voice reduced to a squawk,
my smile to a twisted smirk;
while, up on the deepening murk of the hill,
he is giving one hundred per cent and more to his work.

Mrs Sisyphus was published as part of an 30 part collection of poems by Carol Ann Duffy all based on the premise, My husband is a famous historical or mythological figure and he's an idiot! conjugate to the boomer I hate my wife troupe of newspaper comic strip fame. Selected poems from the volume with requisite sarcastic summaries are:

As is obvious from the list, Duffy often fails to add anything of substance to her poems about mythical characters and typically fails to take the historical ones seriously. However, I think Mrs Sisyphus represents the ideal poem to analyse in order to understand Duffy's failings, on almost every level. Not only does she opt to add a very dramatically empty contribution to the original myth and choose themes that are at best at cross-purposes, but she also does poorly at even the technical construction of the poem itself in a fairly instructive way.

The first thing after the title that caught my ear with this poem was the rhymes. Duffy has made her usual choice/cope of totally abandoning metre (a defining feature of poetry) but retains a conspicuous rhyming scheme. I say conspicuous because you apparently have to change your accent multiple times in order to have it consistent.

(Jerk to park works in most, maybe preferring some sort of Irish, but dork, gawk and lark throw it off, before the final run from shirk to work is another collection of working rhymes, broken only by the rather pathetically inserted similar Bach. While I would prefer to give the benefit of doubt to the poet, in this case the rhymes are already so haphazard it's a serious possibility she meant for Bach to rhyme with the rest — to what accent this corresponds, I have no clue.)

So we are left to assume Duffy actually went for the scheme of rhyming the consonant ending -rk rather than the syllable -erk, which, were it not perhaps too great an expectation of Duffy would remind me of the alliterative rhyming in old English poetry. This nevertheless raises the question of why she chose to lead into the poem with such a strong repetition of the -erk syllable; confusing the ability of readers to follow the scheme with their natural inclination to want to continue that line ending which the author began.

In fact, the whole first stanza obeys the -erk ending perfectly in certain accents. The second stanza wobbles and then topples fairly quickly and — I encourage you to try this by reading it out — the consonant-rhyming only endings do not actually have the effect of a rhyme, the real effect being that the reader may feel he or she is not reading the poem correctly due to the vowel near misses.

Confounding this further are the unrhymed lines — are they unrhymed? Moon could rhyme with down if you affect a certain Scottish accent (But then why not write doon?) neverminding that it breaks several other rhymes. Bach has been discussed, and hopefully it's clear exactly why whether it is intended to ludicrously rhyme is not clear, and that leaves Noah's wife, which flows quickly into the next, as the only unambiguously unrhymed line.

All of this is to say the chosen rhyming scheme grants the poem an entirely unnecessary (and unintended?) air of confusion. For all her realism and simple/free metres, Duffy ends with a mess of false rhymes and broken flow.

I have said the first thing that caught my ear was the title. My flatmates and I were looking through a list of poems in The World's Wife, after commiserating over being given Mrs Midas back in school, when my friend read out "Mrs Sisyphus," which sent us laughing for maybe a minute. The idea is so absurd. The boomer fantasy switchup of What if there was a poem about a famous guy... but actually it was about his wife?? is a concept that feels tired as soon as it has been said aloud, in my opinion; pen never need be put to paper in order to exhaust the scant profound sentiments that can come of it, and, yet, here is a poet, who has both read and thought, and who has, presumably after writing maybe a half-dozen poems riffing on the idea, reached the absolute zenith of the concept in the literally laughable premise: Sisyphus' wife thinks her husband is an idiot for pushing a boulder up a hill for all eternity. I mean it actually starts with the exact type of phrase we were using to oversimplify the other poems; the first line may as well be Ugh! There goes my husband pushing a boulder up a hill for all eternity! What an idiot!

At first it doesn't even seem like a load-bearing concept. It's stupid and that's that, only an insane person could hear the myth of Sisyphus and think it needs a sarcastic retelling by a disgruntled provincial housewife; but the more I thought about it over time, the more I realised it was actually a deeply complicated cockup on Duffy's part. It doesn't work, but any attempt to dig the poem out of the mire results only in further problems. It's a fractally bad choice of theme.

Start with the literal reading. It's stupid; the Sisyphus of myth is pushing that rock because he has been punished by the gods, he is not doing this out of choice. In fact, he would rather be doing most anything else because his fate is rightly seen as a terrible punishment. Why would his wife be so angry at this? The literal reading does not work; fine.

The obvious next step is to interpret the poem as an allegory for a man's work: Neglecting his family, his wife, Mr Sisyphus has given 110% to his work and will not listen to Mrs Sisyphus who is at her wits end trying to convince him to take a break. In this view, Duffy is using the powerful story of Sisyphus as a cheap vehicle to tell a prosaic tale of contemporary domestic estrangement. Perhaps it lends itself to unflattering description but at least it is coherent, no?

Well, there begins the spiral. This not only turns the poem into the negation of the reference it is using/abusing, as Sisyphus of course was not on the doomed hillside by choice at all, but also renders several lines incoherent. If Mr Sisyphus is wasting his time at a superfluous career by choice then why on earth would his wife choose Noah of all people for a comparison? Noah's work on the ark saved his wife, and the ancestors of every other animal alive today; this is a major feature of Noah's story — his work was divinely ordained and entirely necessary. Bach is maybe a more favourable comparison for the wife but he was hardly a notorious workaholic, that has to be inferred from the context in the poem. (Then why bother with a reference? Just to keep up the theme of famous people's wives? Maybe there's some common cultural knowledge about Bach's work distancing him from his wife I don't know about.)

And nobody flocks to gawk at a career man. It's not a lark or a quirk either, although it is reasonable that someone outside a career environment could look in and see it as a load of old bollocks or barking at the moon, true. So I think, Maybe it's not a career, maybe the husband is working on a passion project unrelated to a conventional job? Maybe Noah's ark seemed like that too, so that could save that reference.

But no. What are the "perks" of such a hobby? Would a motivated amateur describe the requirements of his efforts as being lean as a shark? clearly a reference to competitive corporate culture. And of course the final line quite suggestively calls it work.

So if he's not there voluntarily then perhaps the man in the poem is not so different from the real Sisyphus after all? Maybe the poem is a clever commentary on the capitalist economy and neoliberalism's coöption of all of man's free time into it's own system, leaving the once recipients, wives, out in the cold. Man is punished by work! He is chained to the hill-office to push the quarterly report-boulder up, only to have to do it all over again when it rolls back down.

Except the ancient, precapitalist Greeks had jobs too. And it was probably even more urgent for a Greek to get on with his job than it is for modern man, and yet the Greeks never thought that Sisyphus' punishment was comparable to work, in fact it was an extraordinary punishment for a man cheating a death ordained for him (twice!) by gods.

So maybe Sisyphus has one of these "bullshit jobs", a creation of capitalism, which could certainly accord with the myth (but not Noah or Bach). Except he loves his job and not only believes he has a career in it but puts in an amazing amount of effort. If Mr Sisyphus' job is bullshit and doesn't actually do anything he is too stupid to realise it. (Obviously this runs into many of the problems of the earlier careerist interpretation. People still don't gawk at office workers.) Furthermore, these last interpretations are veering quite far off the obvious focus of not only the poem, but of the greater work (The World's Wife) which is clearly focused on the women involved and not the men, who are necessarily the focus if the careerist commentary is the intended main theme. Where can we go from here without totally abandoning the source material? Sisyphus works, his work doesn't mean anything, his wife hates it, but he loves his work, he defends his work against her and must prefer it to her — but with no good reason, says Mrs Sisyphus, as that boulder comes tumbling back down the hill. What Mr Sisyphus can see in this is beyond her.

As we finally find ourselves returning to the boomer, Husband Stupid meme, (My husband is always working! What an idiot!) which may be the only coherent interpretation of the poem, and indeed of many of the poems in the volume, we find the poem is that of an ignored wife whose husband has been forced by the capitalist system into a working a hard and pointless job that he is devoted to and grants him some wealth and satisfaction and for which people mock him, which is just like the biblical hero Noah and Bach the genius of centuries. What a load of rubbish. The only decent comparison to Sisyphus this poem can give us is the reader trying to find in it some meaning.


This page was last updated or edited in the January of 2025
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