In this poem, time is not simply a constant presence. Instead it is an agent, acting seemingly of its own accord. Its actions can be oppressive. The ongoing movement of time threatens to steal away both literal and metaphorical light from the speaker. It prompts the speaker to anticipate her own death with a blend of anxiety and resignation, and it harshly designates the past as inaccessible and unchangeable despite the speaker's desire to regain or relive it. Time is the poem's antagonist, essentially, as well as the mystery at its center. Carol Ann Duffy is hardly the first poet to delve into time—either from the perspective of metaphysical inquiry or of emotional devastation. Here, we will examine three different works of poetry, from three different time periods, that similarly take time as their central theme.
The speaker of "Mean Time" experiences time primarily as a force that renders her passive or powerless. But "carpe diem" poems, which exhort addressees to "seize the day," express the opposite: in these works, time is something that humans can and should attempt to master. Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" is perhaps the most famous work in this carpe diem tradition. It was written in the seventeenth century, during which this treatment of time was especially common. Here, a speaker urges listeners to "Gather ye rose-buds while ye may," suggesting that while time, in the form of aging and mortality, will ultimately win out, people should aim to enjoy their lives during the time they have been allotted. This work focuses especially on the fleeting nature of youth, arguing that "That age is best which is the first,/When youth and blood are warmer." This, Herrick suggests, makes it all the more important to reap the benefits of youth before it disappears.
Two centuries later, Emily Dickinson explored the link between time and death, much like Duffy. However, her poem "A Clock Stopped" takes a more detached, oblique approach to the topic. Dickinson uses a broken clock as an extended metaphor for death. She describes a clock ceasing its ticking, and emphasizes the impossibility of fixing it. "Geneva’s farthest skill/Can’t put the puppet bowing –," she writes, invoking the association between the city of Geneva and clockmaking. The clock's constancy, in this work, is taken entirely for granted until it suddenly stops functioning. Thus, Dickinson suggests, life itself feels inevitable, and is taken for granted, until it ends. Whereas Duffy describes a speaker burdened by the knowledge of eventual death, Dickinson instead describes death as a surprise, coming suddenly upon human beings hubristic enough to forget their own mortality.
Meanwhile, Maya Angelou's "Passing Time," published in 1975, discusses time as a fluid and cyclical phenomenon rather than an inflexible march forward. Angelou compares time to skin color, describing both as existing upon a spectrum rather than consisting of discrete categories—past and present, black and white. In this way, Angelou suggests that all people are intertwined, and simultaneously argues that individuals in the present are invariably entangled with the future and past alike. "Your skin like dawn/Mine like musk," Angelou writes, first highlighting difference and diversity, before continuing, "One paints the beginning/Of a certain end," thereby linking this diversity into a single complex experience of time.
These poems take vastly different approaches to the question of time. Each one offers different metaphorical images to illustrate and discuss time, ranging from skin color to a broken clock. Moreover, these works range from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. Of course, these are only a small sample of famous works discussing this theme, even within the English-speaking world. Duffy's poem, for all of its simplicity, exists in a long and diverse tradition of literature preoccupied with and intrigued by the passage of time. For readers knowledgeable about the tradition, additional layers and readings of Duffy's poem become evident.
