Mean Time

• “The clocks slid back an hour”

  • Metaphorical phrase represents the passage of time- movement from summer to autumn
  • Fluency of slid
  • summer to autumn- light to darkness - Greenwich meantime, world is moving into coldness reflecting her.
  • comparing the loss of light to her loss of love.
  • personifying time as being mean or cruel
• “Stole light from my life“

  • Personifies tune as a villainous force, time is a thief, time is ugly and cruel. thieving the person of beauty and hope that the light symbolises.
  • Time is ugly, hasty and vicious, stealing the love from her life
  • 4 stanzas, 4 lines, some lines are longer than others, reflecting Duffy's mental state.
  • sibilance of 'slid' and 'stole' evokes times slipperiness and stealth.
• “The clocks slid back an hour and stole light from my life”

  • Metaphor for endings and loss, Metaphor - literally lost an hour of light (Greenwich) and a positive force of radiance in life.
  • Cyclical nature of clocks: inescapability, 'stole' - forceful, ending of relationship no choice and ends up feeling bereaved. 'slid': ungainly attempt to catch a hold of something, time slipping through peoples fingers: lack of control.
  • active verb time is a force of vigour and power, concerned with deriving humanity of love. Short abrupt sounds: echo the sharpness. First person perspective: intimate
• As I walked through the wrong part of town,/ mourning our love’

  • Metaphor - every place seems wrong without them despite there being no physical barriers - irreparable damage : everything is different without them.
  • Time has very active verbs of power and gain whereas the persona has very passive verbs of defeat.
  • Poems holistic structure represents the regularity of time, while the irregular line lengths represent the persona’s struggles to come to terms with the love they have lost.
  • Metaphor for endings and finality and the eventual grief and bereavement that we are left with: taunting
• ‘If the darkening sky could lift’

  • Reflect the universal effects of time on love and life and remind readers of our fragility and the inevitable demise of love.
  • Duffy reveals the impossibility of trying to alter time through the fallacy of turning back the clocks - although we alter time on a man-made object we can’t actually turn back time itself.
  • Time is essentially unstoppable no matter how much the persona longs to ’lift more than an hour from this day’.
• A03: Duffy is reflecting her own mental state, showing how time has stolen the love from her life, as well as the light.