Summary
The speaker speculates about what would happen if she could turn back time, bringing back more than just one hour of light. She imagines that she could take back the words she regrets saying, as well as the ones spoken to her by her ex-lover. Of course, though, this isn't a possibility. Instead, both the speaker and the addressee will one day be dead. No light will reach them then. For now, the speaker has to endure what feels like constant darkness in the form of short winter days and long nights.
Analysis
This poem's discussion of winter's time changes—the shortening of days and the turning back of the clocks—is symbolic, with this environmental, literal darkness representing an internal, emotional darkness. But it functions on a more literal level as well, setting a scene for the speaker's lonely wandering. The poem becomes a nuanced account of the way that physical and emotional life combine with one another and work in concert. The speaker's heartbreak is exacerbated and intensified by the literal darkness around her, causing her to feel that the darkness will be neverending, and indeed causing her to feel that it foreshadows her eventual death. In fact, by the poem's final stanza, the speaker has begun to feel that her entire life is simply a period of lying in wait for death. In this way it is "mean time" in the sense of unfilled time or time spent waiting for an event: all of life, for this speaker in her heartbreak, is only spent waiting to die.
Carol Ann Duffy does not use an entirely consistent meter or rhyme scheme in this work. The first two stanzas of the poem are unrhymed, or, at moments, make use of very subtle slant rhymes. In the work's latter half, however, Duffy relies more extensively on end rhyme. She rhymes the second and fourth lines of each of the two closing stanzas, matching "day" with "say" and "light" with "nights." This end rhyme creates a feeling of finality and non-negotiability. Just as the speaker anticipates darkness and death as inevitable endpoints, the reader begins to anticipate specific rhyming sounds as inevitable endpoints of the stanza. The poem's musical structure, in other words, changes to track and imitate the speaker's increasingly fatalistic mood.
