'Return to Cardiff' by Dannie Abse

The poem...

'Hometown'; well, most admit an affection for a city:
grey, tangled streets I cycled on to school, my first
        cigarette
in the back lane, and, fool, my first botched love affair.
First everything. Faded torments; self-indulgent pity.

The journey to Cardiff seemed less a return than a raid
on mislaid identities. Of course the whole locus smaller:
the mile-wide Taff now a stream, the castle not as in
      some black,
gothic dream, but a decent sprawl, a joker's toy façade.

Unfocused voices in the wind, associations, clues,
odds and ends, fringes caught, as when, after the doctor
       quit,
a door opened and I glimpsed the white, enormous face
of my grandfather, suddenly aghast with certain news.

Unable to define anything I can hardly speak,
and still I love the place for what I wanted it to be
as much as for what unashamedly is
now for me, a city of strangers, alien and bleak.

Unable to communicate I'm easily betrayed,
uneasily diverted by mere sense reflections
like those anchored waterscapes that wander, alter, in
       the Taff,
hour by hour, as light slants down a different shade.

Illusory, too, that lost dark playground after rain,
the noise of trams, gunshots in what they once called
      Tiger Bay.
Only real this smell of ripe, damp earth when the sun
        comes out,
a mixture of pungencies, half exquisite and half plain.

No sooner than I'd arrived the other Cardiff had gone,
smoke in the memory, these but tinned resemblances,
where the boy I was not and the man I am not
met, hesitated, left double footsteps, then walked on.

Commentary...

In this poem I think that the speaker's return to Cardiff, his 'Hometown' has made him realise that it's very different to what it was before, it was now "alien and bleak" to him. However, there's still and always will be a part of him that will love and think of Cardiff as home simply for the reason that it was his first home and the happy childhood and early adulthood memories created there, his "first (for)everything" happened there such as his "first cigarette" and "first botched love affair". It mattering to the speaker that his firsts happened in Cardiff suggests that to him, Cardiff is like the foundation to who he is, the place holds great sentimental value.

In this poem there is a sense of decay in the speaker's hometown of Cardiff, the "mile-wide Taff now a stream, the castle not as in some black, gothic dream, but a decent sprawl, a joker's toy facade", although this could suggest decay, it could also suggest ow the speaker has the ability to see things for what they really are, unlike when he was a child and may have exaggerated things a lot, perhaps because a child's perception of reality can be more exciting. The "mislaid identities" and Cardiff being "alien" to the speaker suggests that he feels out of place, being surrounded by "strangers". This could link to Larkin's poem 'Dockery and Son', because the speaker feels different to the people around him.

The change in Cardiff is emphasised by the speaker when he is "unable to define anything", he "can hardly speak" suggesting that the unfamiliarity of his hometown is overwhelming for the speaker. The speaker felt "betrayed" by the changes to begin with, where "Cardiff had gone", meaning that what Cardiff was to him was no longer there. At the end of the poem the speaker "walked on", suggesting that he has accepted that Cardiff isn't the same as his memories envisaged.

Another Larkin poem which this Abse poem reminds me of is 'Here' as in both, the speakers return to their hometown, which is important to them in some way.