Queen Herod is based on Duffy's The World's Wife, a collection that reverses gender roles to celebrate female characters and show the injustice of men's generalizations. This poem reverses gender roles in the biblical story of the arrival of the Magi for the birth of Jesus and the massacre of the innocents ordered by King Herod. Through this transposition, Duffy originally presents the atrocities of men, but then indicates that women can also act forcefully and convincingly to fight for strong beliefs. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayDuffy shows women as cunning and deceitful while having a silent agenda against men and uses generalization against men to demonstrate the injustice of the original stories. In the poem, the "Three Queens" arrive to see Queen Herod's daughter and offer her qualities rather than material gifts: "Grace... Strength... Happiness." These abstract capitalized names are juxtaposed with the seemingly useless and overlooked material (“Silver and gold, the pennies”) given to Jesus, referring to the gold, frankincense, and myrrh given in the biblical story. Duffy thus suggests that while men desire only limited material gifts, women desire useful, everlasting qualities. Furthermore, in Queen Herod the asyndetus of “with gifts…in exchange for submerged baths, curtained beds, fruit, better meat and wine, dancing girls, music, chatter,” leaving mimetically “until the bitter dawn” at the end , connotes the amount of pleasure only for the Queen as the men were "soundly asleep" and for a long time she enjoyed her activities without being disturbed by the men. While “bitter dawn” might suggest how early she stays up in the morning, it more likely suggests that she enjoys time spent without men; when Herod and his men wake up, suddenly the day becomes “bitter” and the Queen must become violent and terse to deal with them. This change is further emphasized by the arching of the stanza, mimetic of the night, as the night culminates with the longer "in exchange for sunken baths, tented beds," without Herod, and returns to the laborious day with the more blunt "those vivid three -/until the bitter dawn” when Herod awakens. The cunning wickedness of women is contrasted with the senseless brutality of men to highlight a facade image antithetical nouns as the Three Queens' direct speech: “The Hero completely sure that her daughter will not be harmed, she orders the death of "every mother's child". This command denotes the barbarity that women can inflict for protection to reinforce the fact that violence is not the property of men juxtaposition of the harsh, hissing diction of the men's actions in "hawk, spit, grabbed the smoky jug" with the majesty of the women in "I watched each... the queen rise like a god", emphasizes the contrast of the disgusting men, compared to divinity through simile, as women become the dominant force over the pathetic actions of men. This theme is reinforced in Medusa by the repetition of first-person pronouns – “my… I” – with the recurring use of synonymous verbs such as “hissed and spat” to imply that women can be possessive and domineering. Furthermore, Duffy assures that female characters are more intelligent than men. The tautology of “They knew what they knew” emphasizes instinctive knowledge, as if this repetition were specific to.”