Mean time and afternoons

• Through Duffy's 'Mean Time' and Larkin's 'Afternoons' both poets present their fascination with the cynical nature of time and cruelty of it's ability to end periods of time even if not desired. Larkin's 'Afternoons' depicts the fade of romance due to children stealing the sheen of the relationship. Whereas through 'Mean Time' Duffy personifies time in a cruel light and almost pleads the content in her life is brought back to her
• 'The clocks slid back an hour'


  -short abrupt sounds echo the sharpness and depth of pain

  -metaphor for ending and loss

  -attempt to catch something - time slipping through peoples fingers
• 'summer is fading'


  -metaphor - progression of life, autumn is a metaphor for life transition from hope and love to disappointment

  -life's passage from youth to old age is natural as seasons changing

  -disappointment and observant third person view

  -times eroding effects on beauty

  -holistic structure of 3 regular 8 line stanzas - regularity of time
• 'stole light from my life'


  -first person perspective - intimate and devastating portrayal of times effects on people

  -'stole' forceful ending of a relationship

  -paradox of limitations as humans vs time

  -metaphor - literally lost an hour of light

  -we can turn the clocks back but not time itself
• 'And the albums lettered our wedding, lying'


  -domestic imagery enforces gender roles of the era

  -caesura - distance between a man and a woman in a relationship

  -'lying' - marriage pushed aside lie of love and happiness

  -relationships, much like the letters have no meaning

  -italics - mocking the contract of marriage and all it promised to deliver
• 'Before them, the wind is ruining time, their courting places'


  -metaphor of 'wind' - ruination of simply a natural effect of time

  -pathetic fallacy and personification - past memories are being blown away by a physical presence

  -natural imagery is used to mirror the changes in a woman life

  -steady erosive power of wind is often used as a parallel to the effects of time

  -idea that wind destroying their courting place is paralleled with once passionate couples lacking lust
• A03

  -Duffy is well known for her distrust of language and her attempts to use simple diction to convey a deeper and more complex meaning emphasised through 'slid' and 'stole'

  -Duffy and Larkin use their poems to challenge old fashioned idea of what British society from 1950s considered ordinary

  -Larkin is influenced by Romantic poetry of Yeats and the fatalistic tone of Hardys work and can be seen to use romantic natural imagery and subvert it through images of natural innocence.
• Andrew Motion 'Larkin was much less interested in nature for its own than for the opportuinities it offers to moralise about the human condition'
• Ludwig Wittgenstein 'Duffy was influenced by his philosophical theories of inevitability'