Afternoons & Mean Time

• 1.While Duffy uses her poem ‘meantime’ to explore the idea of time ‘destroying what we hold precious’ as she makes time out to be a villainous force. Larkin uses his poem ‘Afternoons’ to present the effects of time as a universal and inevitable experience that everyone will have to undergo and that most will experience this pain of ‘time ruthlessly destroying’ our most precious moments. 
•  “The clocks slid back an hour and stole light from my life”
• “As i walked through the wrong part of town, mourning our love”
• “summer is fading”
• “albums, lettered Our Wedding, lying near the television”
• A03 - “The clocks slid back an hour and stole light from my life”

  Duffy is known for her broken relationships. Duffy perhaps is blaming times cruelty and ruthlessness for taking away these symbols of joy reflecting how “time offers nothing in return”.
• A03 - “Summer is fading”. Larkin was influenced heavily by the Romantics Yeats and Hardy. Can be seen as a metaphor for the progression of life which is slowly fading. This can be even more convincing when considering how influenced larkin was by these Romantics. 
• A05 - Andrew Motion argues that ‘Larkin was much less interested in nature for its own sake than the opportunity it provides to moralise about the human condition’. Can be applied to Larkins open line ‘summer is fading’ as it's a metaphor for the progression of life, something natural and inevitable.