Mean Time & Afternoons

• 2. Both Larkin and Duffy use their poems to explore the ‘better’ and the ‘worse’ and times cyclical nature, how it provides us with opportunities but also destroys them. While duffy focuses on the raw and cruel emotion, Larkin presents the effects of time as a more natural process and its universal nature.
• “As i walked through the wrong part of town, mourning our love” - MT
• “the clocks slid back an hour, and stole light from my life” - MT
• “summer is fading” - A
• “albums, lettered Our wedding lying” -A
• A03 - “The clocks slid back an hour and stole light from my life”

  Duffy has a known past of broken relationships. Duffy perhap is blaming time being cruel for changing and taking these symbols of joy reflecting how time will change everything, good or bad.
• A03 - “Summer is fading”

  Larkin was influenced heavily by the Romantics Yeats and Hardy. This can be even more convincing when considering how influenced Larkin was by these Romantics.
• 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.