Anthropocene Aquariums: Eco-critical Resistance in the Confined Voices of Duffy’s “The Dolphins”

Carol Ann Duffy's poem “The Dolphins” dramatizes the plight of marine life constrained within human-made enclosures. Written in the first-person plural, the poem grants dolphins a voice to articulate their alienation, captivity, and displacement from their ecological habitat. This paper examines “The Dolphins” through the dual theoretical lenses of anthropocene and eco-criticism, situating Duffy's poetic voice as a form of ecological resistance against human domination and exploitation of non-human species. The aquarium here becomes a metaphorical and literal emblem of the anthropocene: a site where human intervention reshapes ecological existence into spectacle, consumption, and confinement. Drawing upon eco-critical thinkers such as Cheryll Glotfelty, Lawrence Buell, and Timothy Clark, as well as scholarship on animal studies and green poetics, the paper argues that Duffy's dolphins function as submerged witnesses to the violence of the anthropocene. Through a close textual analysis of the poem, this essay demonstrates how Duffy's dolphins resist erasure by articulating memory, loss, and ecological consciousness within their imprisoned waters, transforming poetic form into a site of resistance against ecological degradation.