Love’s time’s beggar, but even a single hour
bright as a dropped coin, makes love rich.
We find an hour together, spend it not on flowers
or wine, but the whole of the summer sky and a grass ditch.
For thousands of seconds we kiss; your hair
like treasure on the ground; the Midas light
turning your limbs to gold. Time slows, for here
we are millionaires, backhanding the night
so nothing dark will end our shining hour,
no jewel hold a candle to the cuckoo spit
hung from the blade of grass at your ear,
no chandelier or spotlight see you better lit
than here. Now, Time hates love, wants love poor,
but love spins gold, gold, gold from straw.
OVERVIEW
How would you spend your time with someone you cared about deeply?
Think about your language around time. Your lexis of time.
Is time precious?
Ever finite?
Why can’t we buy it?
And once we spend time, can we ever reclaim it or is that what memory is for?
Does memory reanimate ‘lost time‘ so we can defy time, defy even the many ways that we practice at death before we finally die?
Why do we sometimes use words to suggest that time is a a form of currency to be exchanged?
Carol Ann Duffy’s poem‘Hour‘ explores the value of time when time bears the burden of secrecy, a relationship that for some reason is enjoyed away from the gaze of the public; possibly an illicit and private love.
It is noticeable that we never learn the name of the beloved in the poem, only that they have golden hair. And gold seems to dominate the poem, colouring the images and reminding us of time’s value and love’s precious worth.
The Hour’s currency is gold. It has the value of enchantment and ‘worth’ but also perhaps a coldness and sterility that even ecstasy cannot heat up for long.
This anonymity allows readers to make the beloved into their own beloved. There is the space to make the poem apply to ourselves.
Yet at the same time we are also aware that there are touches within the poem’s image repertoire that seem personal and specific. The golden hair for example is viewed with awe.
Reading the poem again today, I am aware that Duffy’s ‘Hour’ may apply to any emotionally driven situation where lovers experience time very personally as a treasured commodity that will feed their imaginations and physical longings even and especially when the beloved is absent.
One hour with you is worth 500 hours with others.
When we are in love we may ‘trade’ time, buying time and selling time in order to spend the precious hour(s) with ‘you’.
The language Duffy uses in this AQA Anthology poem, plays with the connotations of ‘spending time’. Duffy is making us aware of the ‘currency’ of love.
‘I would like to spend time with you.’
Think about it.
If time is something we may arrogantly believe is ours to ‘spend’ then why does Duffy combine her ecstatic revisitation of pastoral physicality( what are they doing in a ditch?!) with planted ‘seeds’ of a later revision of their love. The ‘Midas’ touch so to speak.
As I have said elsewhere on Tusitala, the mere mention of ‘Midas” should send readers to their mythology anthology or better still to Duffy’s own poem in her World’s Wife, Mrs Midas.
For if your ‘limbs turn to gold’ how does that affect our relationship, our physical intimacy? What does this reference signify about your attitude to money, to the material world?
Perhaps it signifies that you are unobtainable for some reason(married?) or that there was something about the beloved that now, retrospectively the poet claims to have noticed, ‘even then’?
Beginnings and ends are all mixed up? The bathos of the ‘ditch’ and the irony of the Midas’ touch cannot be ignored as they are full of PURPOSE!
For all the poems in Rapture are edited through the emotional eye of retrospect. We all ‘doctor’ the past once we have the benefit of hindsight, even if that hindsight is profoundly painful.
And we must notice that all the ecstasy, the reverential language, the celebration of their special encounter where they defy time’s attempt to render love ‘poor’ emanates from the poet.
The beloved is caught up in this special vista of love. The poet expands their lexis of love, their horizons both physical and geographical. Yet the adoration of the beloved seems to overwhelm or silence the intuitive understanding of the beloved’s flaws. the vanity, the love of the material, the day to day enjoyment of ‘wine’ and ‘flowers’.
For the fact that this ‘Hour’ is a novelty suggests that the Beloved may indeed love the very things that have been temporarily suspended. Novelty may be a temporary turn on, but the Midas self cannot be silenced.
The theatricality for the beloved’s arranged limbs seem ‘fake’ and designed to seduce. The real message beneath the poem’s rhapsodic surface is ‘worship me’.
For aren’t I the altar of love?