Dame Carol Ann Duffy’s “Selling Manhattan” (1987) uses a dramatic shift in voice to reveal how the environmental crisis of the 21st century has its roots in the toxic rise of capitalism centuries earlier. The poem is informed by the outrage over treatment of America’s Indigenous cultures by European settlers in the 17th century, as well as by the damage wrought by the rapacious overdevelopment of the earth by forces first unleashed by the same settlers who reduced the earth to a commodity.

Written from the perspective of an outsider to the American experience—Duffy is a Scottish-born British poet—the poem indicts the earliest colonizers of what was perceived then to be a new world, there for the taking, at the expense of Indigenous cultures. The poem takes as its starting point the notorious bargain struck in 1626 between Dutch settlers and Indigenous tribes unaware even of the concept of owning or selling land: $24.00 worth of glass beads for thousands of acres of rich land that would later become the island of Manhattan. Employing the choral voice of the Indigenous peoples in tune with the darkest implications of European civilization’s simplification of the land to a resource, the poem sounds a sobering elegy for a natural world once held sacred, now all but lost.

Poet Biography

Carol Ann Duffy was born on December 23, 1955, in Glasgow, a major industrial city in central Scotland. Raised in a working-class Catholic household, Duffy early on was a voracious reader. Particularly with the plays of Shakespeare, Duffy was fascinated by how verse could create character. In 1961, her father, an electrical contractor who designed and installed electrical boards, took the family (Duffy and her four younger brothers) to Stafford, England, some four hours south, when he accepted a position at English Electric, a massive industrial complex that produces electrical devices.

Duffy began writing and publishing poetry in her mid-teens. Intrigued by theological questions about the soul, the nature of love, and the spiritual dimension of the material world, Duffy completed a degree in philosophy in 1977 from nearby Liverpool University. Certain she wanted to write poetry, she took a position at the BBC while she worked on her verse. Her first collection, Standing Female Nude (1985), brought her immediate critical praise. Her follow-up collection, Selling Manhattan (1987), secured her reputation for her mastery of intricate, subtle rhythms, her bold investigation into philosophical issues of the heart, as well as her cutting wit and sense of social outrage.

Over the next 20 years, Duffy, a prolific poet, enjoyed both critical success and popular success as well, a rare combination for contemporary poets. Not only were her collections bestsellers but Duffy received numerous prestigious poetry awards, most notably the 1989 Dylan Thomas Award presented by Swansea University in Wales to promising poets under the age of 40, and the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize, awarded annually by the poet’s Foundation for the best new collection of poetry in the English language (for her collection Rapture). In 1996, she accepted a post in the Creative Writing School in London’s Metropolitan University, a post she held for more than 20 years. In addition, Duffy emerged as an influential critic and essayist, as well as a successful children’s book author.

Duffy found herself in the middle of a controversy in 1999 when she was widely considered a shoo-in to be named England’s Poet Laureate, a prestigious 10-year position that had never been held by a woman in its more than 350 years. Prime Minister Tony Blair, however, reportedly felt Duffy’s bisexuality might prove a problem. Ten years later, however, Duffy was offered the post and accepted on behalf, she said, of all the great female poets never given the chance to serve in the position. In 2015, Duffy was elevated to Dame Commander of the British Empire.

Poem Text

Duffy, Carol Ann. “Selling Manhattan.” 1987. Pan Macmillan.

Summary

The opening quatrain, set apart in italics, renders the historic sale of Manhattan by the Lenape Nation to the newly-arrived Dutch settlers for glass baubles worth about $24.00. The opening lines suggest the settlers also brought weapons and whiskey, both of which would contribute to the downfall of the Lenape. The sudden reality of the fast-approaching diaspora of the Lenape and other Indigenous nations is summed up in the last line of the quatrain when the Dutch drop their veneer of civility and tell the Lenape, “Now get your red ass out of here” (Line 4).

The rest of the poem is spoken by the displaced Indigenous nation itself, an expression of a choral “I.” First, this new speaker wonders whether the Indigenous nations have lost their ancient bond with the land because they were ruined by alcohol, their senses numbed: “You have made me drunk, drowned out / the world’s slow truth with rapid lies” (Lines 6-7). Due to alcoholism, Indigenous cultures were numbed to the implications of this displacement and to the lies told by the representatives of the federal government, which methodically pushed them off their lands using bogus treaties or, when that did not work, military force. But now the Indigenous nations see the devastating results in the land itself. The Europeans have desecrated the earth by reducing it to a commodity: “Wherever / you have touched the earth, the earth is sore” (Lines 8-9).

Stanza 2 continues the indictment of the Dutch settlers by suggesting they have poisoned the water. In their vanity and foolishness, the settlers believe nature is something that can be owned. The carelessness and indifference with which they have polluted the water testifies to their insensitivity. On the other hand, the speaker intones, “I sing with true love for the land” (Line 13), suggesting the Indigenous peoples were better tuned to the spirit of the earth itself.

The Lenape and other nations intuit that “No good will come of this” (Line 15), that is, the arrival of the white settlers. Indeed, they now know the “solemn laws of joy and sorrow” (Line 18), as their centuries-old ties to the land were systematically severed because of the settlers’ need to possess everything: “How many acres do you need / to lengthen your shadow under the endless sky?” (Line 21), a reference to one of the sayings of the Lenape people: a man needs no more land than he can cast his shadow across. The rest belongs by rights to the Great Earth Spirit, which the settlers dismissed as the superstitious hokum of the Lenape Nation.

The fear in the poem is that now, centuries after that sham of a deal, countless Indigenous cultures will vanish. Lines 22-24 compare these diminishing cultures now heading to extinction to the mysterious run of the salmon to the open sea. In time, nothing will remain of these civilizations, nor will they be mourned. Their loss will not be the stuff of great epics. They will be remembered only by the earth itself: “Loss holds the silence of great stones” (Line 24).

In Stanza 6, set apart as its own line, the Indigenous speaker accepts this inevitability of ending. The spirit that animated the tribal culture when it dies, as it will, will live on in the grasshoppers and the buffalo, an affirmation of the idea of the transmigration of the soul and how the soul is thus eternal, even if Indigenous cultures themselves are gone.

The poem ends on an elegiac note. What is left is only the sadness and sorrow of the dying earth, its weakening pulse suggested by the “little shadow” (Line 27) that runs across the grass before it disappears into the dark woods. The poem ends then with nature exhausted, Indigenous cultures and peoples fragmented and scattered, and the colonizing cultures responsible for this nightmare blithely unimpressed by the implications of their culpability.