Nov 2020 – Time on our hands

‘What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?’ So wrote the Supertramp, W H Davies. Lockdown has given some of us more time to stand and stare, as Tina Catling’s ‘Clean Hands’ reflected. On the other hand her poem ‘ing’ suggested that she had in fact been extremely active.

In a similarly percussive style, John Forster read his own ‘Isolation rap’, which you will find elsewhere on this site under ‘Jack the Rapper’.

Sonnet IXX is, as John pointed out, one of many of Shakespeare’s sonnets that contrast temporal decay with the constancy of the poet’s love.

Gerald Manley Hopkins ‘The Leaden Echo’ also refers to the corruption of the body, in an astonishing display of verbal fireworks.

In ‘To the virgins, to make much of time’, (Gather ye rosebuds…) Robert Herrick advises them to hurry up and marry, as time can’t be stopped.

Similarly with Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his coy mistress’, evoking Time’s wingéd chariot – except that he doesn’t seem to be talking about marriage.

An extract from Wordsworth’s verse play ‘The Borderers’ considers how time can be experienced as passing at different speeds.

For instance, in D H Lawrence’s ‘Last Lesson of the Afternoon’, time is dragging terribly.

And in John Keats ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, time is for ever frozen, to magical effect. The lover will never plant his kiss, the empty town will never know where its folk went.

Richard Hill’s ‘Death of a Film Star’ showed how the ravages of time are erased by those celluloid memories. A poem very reminiscent of those of Ken Gambles, who read his own charming ‘Best Wishes to Emily Pringle’.

T S Eliot featured strongly, with two extracts from Four Quartets evoking the enigmas of time. What happened to the past, and to all the alternative pasts that might have been? We heard the first section of ‘Burnt Norton’ and a short section at the beginning of ‘East Coker’, both poems full of memorable – and quotable – imagery.

Tennyson’s ‘A Farewell’ reflects on how time goes on implacably after one’s own time runs out.

In a similar vein, Sarah Teasdale’s ‘There will come soft rains’ says that nature will return to the battlefields of the Great War, indifferent to what had happened there.

Carl Sandberg conjures up a number of human stories in ‘Clocks’.

John Updike’s ‘Saying goodbye to very young children’ movingly celebrates their innocence, which will be a little less when he next sees them.

In ‘A Day in the Life’ from her collection ‘Friend of Heraclitus’, Patricia Beer conjures up some splendid images, as she watches the activities of the farm all day while she should be writing.

Chris Short’s villanelle ‘Never let time slip through your hands’ and acrostic sonnet ‘At the end of time’ can be read on this site.