Mean Time
Commentary
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 stevebrown@clara.co.uk
Mean Time The title of not only this poem, of course, but of the volume as a whole.
That doesn't make this the most important poem in the volume as a whole or a sort of key to the volume - but it does suggest that the suggestions and associations of the title phrase used by this poem also echo through the volume, albeit worked out in different ways or in more detail.
The phrase can be given, perhaps, three broad areas of reference:
  • Greenwich Mean Time.  This is used by the poem as its metaphoric occasion - when the clocks go back in autumn (as part of daylight saving), so that the evenings seem suddenly darker at an earlier hour, presaging the long dark winter nights. What should be the 'right' time (GMT) is suddenly 'lost'.
  • A time that is mean - i.e. cruel, reductive, dispiriting.
  • meantime as in the phrase in the meantime. What you do in the meantime is fill in time, after one event has happened and before some other event occurs: a sort of empty time.

The second and third suggestions fit in with what is suggested by this poem and by others in the volume as a whole: poems dealing with the end of a relationship, and the consequent loss of feelings of love, home, belonging.
The first links in with a more general concern with the nature of Time (or, more precisely, how humans experience the passage of Time - through memory) which recurs throughout the whole volume - from the first poem onwards.
          
the clocks slid back.. The supposed occasion of the poem - when the clocks go back. It situates the poem in Autumn.  But this setting  is only really used in the poem as a metaphor; it is conventional to use autumn/winter in poems as metaphors for loss, endings, completion.  Here, Autumn is a figure for the ending of a relationship.
(It might be worth contrasting this poem to the most famous autumnal poem in English: Keats' To Autumn - if only to bring out the differences.  Keats' poem is impersonal - this, only personal in reference; Keats' poem expresses things brought to fulfillment, completion - this has no sense of anything achieved, surviving (apart from negative hangings-on: mourning..the regrets and guilt of gnawing at all our mistakes). Where Keats' poem refuses to imagine winter (its ending is one of exquisite imaginative balance: winter - the swallows' departure - is about to occur, but the poem closes before it need imagine that baldness), this states, simply and baldly we will be dead, as we know/ Beyond all light.)

Time - the clocks -is given all the agency in the poem - that is, the ability to do things: the clocks slide back, steal light.  The poet is given only fruitless, endless actions in the poem: walk[ing] through the wrong part of town (something pointless in itself); mourning..; [feeling] my heart gnaw...
But, of course, the one action Time will not do is the action desired, requested by the speaker of the poem: remove regrets, remove past, wrong actions (see the hopeless conditional of the third verse). 
light..life..love The three words linked together by alliteration in this verse are the three positives simply and easily removed by Time.
walked through the wrong part of town Link to The Windows, Disgrace, Room - the loss of a relationship brings with it the loss of home, a sense of belonging, a connection to the surrounding landscape.
of course Is there something odd about this phrase here?  It perhaps suggests a kind of dull, apathetic resignation: 'Of course, Autumn brings rain as well as darkness; of course, the end of love brings tears and regrets - what else can you expect?'
unmendable rain The adjective, by its relative unexpectedness, shows, by contrast, how flat the choice of language is generally in the poem (streets are bleak, nights are endless, the sky is darkening: none of these adjectives have any element of surprise.  This seems a deliberate flattening of Duffy's normally original pairing of words.)
The epithet unmendable has become attached to the rain by the rain's association with grief and regrets.  It prepares for the hopeless wish of the third verse:  that Time, which can adjust itself so easily (sliding back the clocks) should adjust the past.  But it won't (malevolently refuses to).  So mistakes will remain, always, unmendable.
streets...mistakes You might have noticed that the poem is (rather loosely) rhymed, in a pattern abcb, so that life is rhymed with love, streets with mistakes, day with say, light with nights. The third verse, with its human wish for neatness in editing the past, rhymes fully - appropriately neatly; the second verse, where the poem most fully expresses the pain of the situation, has the loosest rhymes, barely rhymes at all.  (The last verse hardly expresses pain - more a kind of resignation beyond pain, perhaps.)
our mistakes Following on with this idea that the second verse expresses the most pain, the first and second verse have a kind of parallel endings: ..our love...our mistakes.  But thee is obvious difference within that parallel construction:  if at the end of the first, love has died, it at least survives enough to be mourned;  what survives, at the end of the second, is only the negative - the things done wrongly.
Worth mentioning also what our shows: that the poem is addressed to, and speaks for, the ex-lover (the reader, as it were, only overhears the poem).  This highlights the absence of anger and blame in the poem (Duffy, elsewhere, is fully capable of using anger and blame in poems).  Both partners are equal in the mistakes made (that equality is neatly suggested in the parallel phrases in the last two lines of verse three: there are words I would never have said / nor have heard you say ).  The poem continues the line of Disgrace: ..Woke to the meaningless stars, you / and me both, lost.
That the guilt should be shared in a sort of paradoxical way accentuates the hopelessness of the division between the two.  Anger and blame only has a point if you think something can be changed.
If... The last two verses should be regarded as complementary, as a unit: If [things could be different] But [they can't]; a wish, followed by what makes that wish impossible; an attempt at escape from the terms set up by the poem, and the most conclusive reason why those terms cannot be escaped.
more than one hour A simple reference back to what occasioned the poem: putting the clock back one hour.  But what weighs the poem down now (what prevents the sky lift[ing] more than one hour) has become more than just winter blues.
we will be dead What prevents any amelioration, improvement - and here just stated baldly as a gross, inescapable, conclusive fact: we will die.  Time is inescapable.  Light, life, love simply will die - that is just the nature of things.
as we know This has something of the same dully resigned tone as of course in the second verse: something simply beyond argument.
These are Where the poem finally ends up, what it takes to be its conclusion.  Note that the days and nights are simply presented - as if they, in themselves, explain everything: look at these, what else can you expect or say?  What is not mentioned in these lines are the emotions that the poem has dealt with - because they are, as it were, subsumed within the darkness of the short days and endless nights.  The condition of the world makes explanation, even entertainment, of those emotions redundant.
Of course, even Autumn and Winter have an end - they turn into Spring.  But the poem does not look ahead to that.  The nights don't just feel endless; they are endless.  Is the poem aware of its own apathy in the face of its despair?  Does it mean for its bleak conclusions to be questioned by the reader?

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