Carol Ann Duffy’s bleak retrospect below on a finished love affair, justifies very clearly the title of the poem and collection: ‘Mean Time’. The loss of love’s ‘light’ and time’s compassion, seem to punish the poet as she wanders without safe direction and respite through the ‘wrong part of town.’ What was once possibly fascinating and even sexily transgressive, now seems a grim reflection of her own despair.
In this world, there are no second chances. Thomas Hardy would have been proud of Duffy’s uncompromising bleakness here. We cannot undo what we have done. What I wonder then, is the role of writing in all this experience? Does it heal something, despite everything? Like Hardy’s tentative hope at the end of the Darkling Thrush and The Oxen?
The lexis emphasises the visceral effect of ‘mourning’, making the reader feel their ‘heart gnaw’ and the sheer weight of this day, without light, without the beloved. This is a foretaste the poet suggests, of the final vanishing, the final ‘wrong part of town’, when we disappear altogether from the light.
The clocks slid back an hour
and stole light from my life
as I walked through the wrong part of town
mourning our love
And, of course, unmendable rain
fell to the bleak streets
where I felt my heart gnaw
at all our mistakes
If the darkening sky could lift
more than one hour from this day
there are words I would never have said
nor have heard you say
But we will be dead, as we know,
beyond all light
these are the shortened days
and the endless nights.
