Return to Cardiff

Themes: place/home/journey

Links to Abse's Down the M4 and On The Coast

              Larkin's Here

Abse has "an affection" for the city he lives in -> shows he has strong feelings for his hometown

Stanza 1 - 2nd and 3rd line -> reference to his childhood memories -> "my first botched love affair" -> teenage life and the difficulties he's had with relationships (this quote also links to Abse's Blonde Boys)

"a raid on mislaid identities" -> he's lost sight of who they are his perceptions of them have changed

"the mile-wide Taff now a stream" -> when he was younger everything seemed 'larger than life'

"joiners façade" -> everything was simple that he could turn into a game - a different place to what it actually is

"white" -> in reference to Abse's grandfather -> white suggests innocence and purity

Stanza 4 -> he loves the place he imagined it to become but how he doesn't recognise it - " a city of strangers, alien and bleak"

"waterscapes that wonder" -> alliteration

"uneasily diverted by mere sense of reflections" -> his love for Cardiff hasn't changed even though what he envisioned is different to how it is now (how it turned out)

"dark playground" -> reference to his childhood - the memory is fading slowly to black 

"gunshots" -> connotes violence

"illusory" and "real" -> shows a juxtaposition between his memories and how the same place is very different before he moved away -> only thing left is the smell

"the other Cardiff had gone" -> using "no sooner than I'd arrived" suggests that almost straight away he had noticed the change and that Cardiff wasn't the same

He is constantly being reminded of the "old Cardif" by small things but they were important things to him

"the boy I was not and the man I am not met" -> the two people he thought he was (he's not anymore) -> represents the two fazes of his life that are in Cardiff

"then walked out" -> shows that he knows that both he and Cardiff have both changed