Robin:

I hope this isn't redundant, I see to having some server glitch. Thanks
for your interesting response.

>>I was thinking about the lack of context specifically in terms of the
language -- a context to allow us to judge whether the elements of cliche in
the language are deliberate.

My point here is that a poem is not really "about" anything, though we use this way of speaking of it for convenience. Whatever the poem's subject,  it is inseparable from the language in which it is expressed. So there is no context that a poem can provide except its language, and it seems to me, that, in the case of this poem, it is quite obvious that the cliches are deliberate, though how successful the cliche is as a strategy is another argument.

<<
but it seems to me a willful misreading to read the poem as if it were a
tawdry expression that uses its cliches unknowingly, as if the poet knew no
better.
>>

>>That's a telling point -- you could say that the (language) context is
Duffy's work as a whole. Here, I'm (still <g>) hampered by not having got
any further in reading her.
>>

Well, again, at the risk of repeating myself, I don't think the author's entire work can provide the context for the individual poem. The individual poem might be illustrative but it could equally be exceptional. I think that to read the "poet" rather than the poem is the problem here, from my point of view.

>
>

To say
something comes out of something else implies that it is lifted or stolen or
plagiarized, and I don't think anyone intends to imply that here.
>>

No, I deliberately chose "comes out of" because I don't think it's plagarism
at all -- in lots of ways, the poems are very different. Perhaps filiation?
(An unfortunate word to chose in this context <g>.) Though Duffy goes out
off her way to deny any strong connection with Larkin.

<<
On the other hand, it could sound like the old rib argument, that out of Larkin's rib, Duffy was created...
>>

[g]

Well, I'm glad you grinned here, because to me it is funny, this whole issue of who is the father of whom?   filiation?  whatever term is used, it suggests that there is something equivalent to pregnancy and inheritance in the association of texts, and I don't think so. Filiation _is_ an unfortunate term to use here, particularly because the poem, oh, have we forgotten the poem, that began the discussion, is under suspicion for this ‘illicit' and, by implication, incestuous, relationship. So it is an aspersion, casting a kind of sexual suspicion upon the generation of the text, hence, the "comes, somehow, out of" or "filiation" as if the Duffy poem were the ill-gotten child of the Larkin poem. And this sort of suspicion is generally cast upon texts by women poets as the same sort of suspicion is cast upon women poets when it is implied that their works are published because it all "comes, somehow, out of" their ‘connection' with some editor or their good looks.
>>
..to me, that there could be seen to be an erotic
relation between the two women in the Hardy poem. I dunno that I'd go with 
that as a reading (it doesn't seem to me to fit the larger pattern of
Hardy's work), but I introduced the caveat: "(or maybe it is?)" for that
very reason. Though it's perhaps more about female empowerment than female 
desire in either sense. Mind you, there's a (I think deliberate)
Significant Void in the way Hardy deals (comically) with the situation --
clothes but no sex!..>>

Well, the Significant Void is the missing male, whoever it is that buys this finery and clothes for sexual favors, or perhaps it is male/s.  Hardy erases the man from this poem and that erasure is partly what overturns the conventional expectations of what it means to be ruined. What vanishes is the man and the sexual act, and what we are given is a conversation between two women.

I suppose it depends on how you define "erotic relation." But in both of these poems, one woman looks at another as a desirable or beautiful object, and in both there is a suggestion at least of mutuality. The poems are very different, most noticeably from one being entirely dialogue, and the other utterly devoid of speech, we gather what we can from an overheard conversation, we are given the interior feeling in the Duffy poem. But still, in their essential elements, both poems involve this unexpected gaze, which has unexpected result.  In the Hardy poem what seems to be desired most are the things, the rich results of being ruined, if these two had been the maid, they would have wanted the pearls.

I'm also curious how do you know that this Significant Void is deliberate on Hardy's part?
There seems to be no more evidence for that than in the Duffy poem, no less either. In both cases, it seems to me to be there in the context created by the language.


>>
I partly stuck the poem in (as well as it does seem to me apposite to the
issue[s]) because when I began to think beyond the specifics of Duffy/"The 
Less Deceived", it occurred to me that, however the Duffy/Larkin link holds
(or doesn't), both she (based on some of Liz's comments) and Larkin are
working in a tradition of Plain Speech (something other than Wordsworth's
real language of men, which wasn't) where Hardy (at least for our time) was
the progenitor.

For me, Hardy is a touchstone in this area, that I measure Larkin against
(can you measure someone against a touchstone?) and find wanting. I'm not
sure just +who+ The True Heir of Hardy (pretentiousness and deliberate irony
intended) is, as the early twentieth century, the modernist movement came
smashing in, and all that Hardy was doing went on hold +till+ Larkin.

Perhaps U.A.Fanthorpe?

>>

I'll have to think about this one. U.A. Fanthorpe? <G>

But again, all of this talk of who is the progenitor, who is the heir?
Why the preoccupation with the genetic transmission of the word?
It gives a whole new meaning to Plath's, daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through, don't you think? <G>