Duck, Collier, and the Ideology of Verse Forms

Do verse forms have ideologies? Stephen Duck's unwitting affirmation of the current socioeconomic order in "The Thresher's Labour" seems to imply that the heroic couplet has a necessary connection to a hierarchical and authoritative universe, just as scholars have implied for decades. But at his better moments, Duck uses the couplet to convey rather than betray his class-based anguish. These moments of control suggest what Mary Collier's more consistent success in "The Woman's Labour" more forcefully supports: the most dominant verse form of the eighteenth century does not have an essential ideology. The two poems remind us that though verse forms can support powerful patterns and tendencies, their meanings must be derived from actual practice.