Comparative Essay Sample: Foreign and Mean Time Poems

Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Foreign’ published in 1998, explores the melancholy side of the human experience through the lens of alienation and homesickness, Duffy also dramatizes the themes of loss and the finiteness of time in her 1993 poem ‘Mean Time’. The superficial aspects of the human experience are able to be challenged through the struggle of the protagonist and both poems' storytelling aspects. Duffy explores the alienation from a community created and the meaninglessness of time and life, without love, drawing an overarching theme of; without human relationships, life is meaningless and lonely. Relationships are pivotal in injecting meaning and connection into life. The niches Duffy creates in either poem allows the audience to slot themselves into the story, ratifying a poignant insight into the human experience. 

‘Mean Time’ 

Without love and hope within one's life, time is portrayed as meaningless in Duffy’s ‘Mean Time’ through the motif of light vs dark and personification. This allows the responder to understand the sheer power love and connections have on providing light in life, through her comparison of life’s desolation without. The poem begins with reference to daylight savings “The clocks slid back an hour and stole light from my life”, She compares this stolen loss of time and light, to her loss of love “I walked through the wrong part of town, mourning our love”, in Stanza One, immediately introducing this connection to the responder. Stanza Three conspicuously shows how the lifting of darkness, and therefore injecting of light into the protagonist's life could help her repair all mistakes, “If the darkening sky could lift

more than one hour from this day, there are words I would never have said”. If she was allowed a meagre hour of light, she may not have lost her lover. Duffy’s implementation of personification, “where I felt my heart gnaw at all our mistakes.” as perhaps an animal or human would, on the reminders of her mistakes, as her heart and mind brings forth her memories. The blankness of her ‘mistakes’ allows the reader to fill with their own mistakes asserting themselves into the story, comparing their own human experience with (as often thought) Duffy’s in the poem.  Duffy allows the responder to interject their own experiences into the poem, casting a realization of one's reality of life, without love. 

‘Foreign’

The collective antagonistic experiences of alienation and isolation are portrayed through the struggles of the protagonist, allowing a dilated understanding of people’s internal struggles in the search for connection to people. Duffy uses piteous imagery and caesura to accentuate her point. The nascency of relatability to isolation, in Duffy’s poem is what gives insight to the negative side of human experiences. The immediate setting of “Imagine living in a strange, dark city” instantaneously immerses the audience into the poem as if they were living it themselves, allowing them to sense the unknownness of the setting. “A name for yourself sprayed in red against a brick wall. A hate name. Red like blood”, the troubling imagery paints a picture of not only isolation, but deep acrimony, enabling a sense of being entirely excluded in an unknown place. Caesura is harnessed by Duffy, to bring further emphasis to the numbness and unhealthy lifestyle created by being in isolation and therefore an endemic unhappiness in life. “You use the public transport. Work. Sleep.” The interruption and distress-causing nature of this line brings preeminence to the dull nature of the protagonist's day. Without connection, life is hollow, this point is expressed vividly by Duffy through the devoid experiences in the protagonist's life.

Carol Ann Duffy is able to create an aperture in her poems ‘Mean Time’ and ‘Foreign’, allowing a personalised experience for the reader, therefore achieving a greater understanding of the experiences of an absence of love and alienation and the pain these experiences cause in life. Duffy’s look into the futile existence of one’s life, constructed due to a lack of connection in ‘Mean Time’ and the feelings of isolation forced upon the reader in ‘Foreign’ blend together to understand the negatives in the human experience of a lonely life.