Key themes: Love, Time, Loss

Title:

The title of this poem is the title of the whole book because this poem encapsulates the different ways in which the title can be interpreted:

In the meantime – refers to the time between significant events in her life.Perhaps the time between the end of her relationship and the next significant event in her life is what is being told in this poem.

Mean time- In this poem, time is being “mean” as it causing darkness and hardship in the poetic voice’s life.

Analysis: 

Stanza 1 – Theme of dejection 

• “The clocks slid back an hour”- 
  • Personification – time has power
  • “Slid” – she has no control over it 
  • The clock goes back an hour in winter – sets time frame for poem 
    • Winter is a time when things are still and unmoving – perhaps mirroring the how she feels her life is going 
• “Stole light from my life”
  • “Light” – metaphor for good things in her life
  • “Stole” – negative, left her bereaved
• “I walked through the wrong part of town”
  • Her light is gone so she is engulfed in loneliness 
  • Doesn’t belong emotionally 
  • Every place feels wrong without her significant other, everything is different, the damage done is irreparable 
• “Mourning our love”
  • The material verb reiterates the symbolic meaning of ‘death’ – the persona is morning the death of their love 
  • Post mortem examination of their relationship after it had ended 
  • “Our” clarifies that it was both theirs

Stanza 2 – Theme of hopelessness 

• “Unmendable rain”
  • Pathetic fallacy- reflects her state of being broken and scarred
• “Bleak streets”
  • “Bleak” – empty
  • No light at end of the tunnel 
• “Felt my heart gnaw”
  • Conveys the heartache she feels
  • “Gnaw” – her heart is eating away at her 
  • Unable to accept end
  • Over Analyzing mistakes 
• “At all our mistakes”
  • Using possessive pronoun to show sharing of blame and how their relationship broke down over time.

Stanza 3 – Theme of nostalgia 

• If the darkening sky could lift”
  • The persona desires hope.She wants to erase the past and start over.
  • “Lift” suggests she carries a heavy burden with her as a result of the past mistakes.
  • “If” suggests she is wishful and longing 
  • “Darkening” contrasts with hopefulness of “if” 
• “There are words I would never had said nor have heard you say”
  • Continuation of the idea that they are both equally to blame and couldn’t communicate properly during their relationship 

Stanza 4 –Theme of bluntness 

• “But we will be dead, as we know”
  • “But” refers back to hopefulness in stanza 3 but is more cynical.She knows that the wish can’t come true and the rest of the stanza explains why this can’t happen  
  • Time and death are both inevitable
• “Beyond all light”
  • Life is temporary and no more light/love/happiness will affect us after death.
• “These are the shortened days
  • Limited + shorter periods of happiness 
  • No reference to the future and what will come around – has some hope as suggested in the previous stanza but is not confident in her wishes coming true 
    • The next period after winter is spring – new relationships and life moving on 
    • Perhaps she doesn’t think she can achieve this or get to the point of moving on 
• And endless nights” 
  • – Is not only an allusion to the long and lonely nights she must spend without her love, it’s also an acknowledgement that the shortening of a day is a metaphor for the shortening of her life itself.Could also be a metaphor that the periods of darkness in her life will never end:Her “unmendable” state is “endless”.
  • “Endless” echoes the idea that there is no hope.

Structure

• Enjambment in first 3 stanzas mirrors how her emotions don’t stop just like time
• The rhyming in the last 2 stanzas suggests a sense of trying to give her life some structure.Perhaps she is making a wish to erase all her mistakes bring back neatness 
• The neater rhyme scheme in stanza 4 emphasises the bluntness of the stanza.
• The last stanza has 2 broken up sentences – The end is near.

Links to context: 

• Carol Ann Duffy studied philosophy – the inevitability of time is a big question in philosophy.