Carol Ann Duffy's Mean Time

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Carol Ann Duffy's Mean Time

Carol Ann Duffy's poem 'Mean Time' is about loss of love and the

different ways in which time brings about change or loss of life

itself. The poem is very personal and autobiographical to Duffy's life

as are most of her poems. 'Mean Time' is based on mourning your lost

love and how regrets seem meaningless when one day you get up and

realise its not just time which has passed you by, but time has stolen

your life too, and in the end it will only be the mourning that you

regret. The idea of time and how it is finite is one of the main

themes in the poem.

The title 'Mean Time' could be emphasising a few points one of which

is how time can be 'mean' when one needs a few moments to reflect on

their thoughts, so in result ' the effects of time can be mean'.

The first line in the opening stanza, conveys one of the themes in the

poem 'the clocks slid back an hour' here Duffy is using sibilance, to

show an image of the clocks sneakily sliding back as it steals 'light

from' her life. Duffy is trying to show how the narrator has had an

hour stolen from her without her awareness, which also highlights that

the speaker has no control over her life, as clocks tend to be turned

back by hand.

The end of the stanza is end stopped, as it describes the character

strolling 'through the wrong part of town' which firstly seems

pointless but also emphasises that the relationship is coming to its

closing stages as there is no where else to go but in the opposite

direction and move on.

In the second stanza there are many connotations of words which

describe the narrator's emotions. First of all the 'unmendabl rain'...

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of love it will bring grief and tears.

Further more another poem which also emphasises the harshness of love

is 'Havisham' the language is this poem is similar to the previous

poems, in tone and emotion. The poem is again from a woman's

perspective; she claims how she got stood up on her wedding day by her

'beloved sweetheart bastard'. The poem is more complex than the other

two mainly because of the gap in time they were written. Similar to

'Mean Time', the poem shows how the woman cannot move on, she also is

mourning her loss, ''not a day since then I haven't wished him dead'

the narrator is finding it hard to move on she longs for 'sweet'

revenge. All of these poems narrators are finding it hard to move on

they are all blinded by 'heartache' and seem to have loss any sense of

life and how precious it can be.

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