Hour Poem Analysis and Guide

A PDF on Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Hour’, with close analysis of imagery, structure, allusion and the poem’s argument about love, time and value.

This resource is useful because it keeps the poem’s main idea very clear from the start - love is short of time, but it still makes a brief moment feel rich. The booklet works through the poem closely, beginning with ‘Love’s time’s beggar’, then moving through the coin image, the rejection of flowers and wine, the Midas reference, the fight against night, the strange beauty of cuckoo spit, and the final triumph of ‘gold, gold, gold’.