Hour – Carol Ann Duffy
Duffy is a contemporary poet and feminist. She is currently Poet Laureate.
The poems title indicates one of the major themes of the poem – the passage of time and its
effects on love.
The poem takes place within an hour that Duffy spent with her lover.
The poem is part of a sequence of love poems entitled ‘Rapture’. The selection traces a
relationship from first meeting to separation.
According to Duffy the poem is about a relationship that had, although it could be about any
relationship.
Overall, the poem provides the reader with a joyful celebration of being in love.
Both partners in the relationship are equally happy and fulfilled at the time.
The only threat to the relationship is, as always, the passage of time.
Although the poem only refers to an hour of the relationship, Duffy clearly alludes to the
slowing down of time when in love and that an hour can seem like an eternity.
Like in To His Coy Mistress time is portrayed as the enemy of love.
Duffy’s personality is reflected in the poem through the use of down-to-earth and natural
imagery – she rejects cliché’s about love in favour of something more realistic – just like
Marvell does in parts of his poem.
In terms of structure Duffy has followed some of the conventions of the Shakespearean
Sonnet.
The poem is 14 lines long, separated into three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. However,
Duffy divides her poem into stanzas, causing the reader to pause at various points.
It does not use the Shakespearean convention of iambic pentameter, and as a result, the
overall effect of the poem is more modern and informal. This also gives the effect of being
much more conversational.
The fact that the poem is written in the present tense reflects Duffy’s idea of time being
important. This love is definitely about the moment, rather than the past or the future.
In her references to herself and her lover, Duffy uses the first - person plural, ‘we’ to make
the poem more inclusive of her lover.
Unlike Marvell, Duffy uses many clichéd images of love – ‘wine, flowers, candles – making it
a poem that is easy for a wider audience to appreciate.
A further example of similarity to Marvell’s poem is the personification of time as the enemy
of love.