Mean Time - Annotations

‘The clocks slid back an hour / and stole light’

Sibilance personifies time as a malign entity

‘Stole light’

Antithetical (oppositional) imagery of light and darkness to convey despair, diminishment, and possibly death

‘The wrong part of town’

Negative urban imagery suggesting a sense of alienation’

‘Mourning our love’

Expressive of sadness and sorrow. Morbid imagery. Equates end of relationship to death.

‘Unmendable rain’ ‘the bleak streets’

Use of the pathetic fallacy to further sense of melancholy that pervades the poem

‘I felt my heart gnaw’

Sense of anguish and pain

‘all our mistakes’

Possessive pronoun - shares responsibility for the termination of the love affair

‘If the darkening sky’

Antithetical imagery/ Darkness conveys coming winter. Clocks sliding back is an extended metaphor for death.

‘One hour from this day’ ‘heard you say’

Rhyme emphasises sense of regret

‘But we will be dead, as we know / beyond all light’

Explicitly morbid as poetic voice considers the relentless march of time and the inevitability of death.