“Time Out”
[Written for Kit Kelen’s Notes to the Translators.]
This poem contrasts the inability of the human imagination to be satisfied with the here-and-now, and the natural world of plants and animals which exist only in the present.
The first stanza deals with plants and treats time and the physical structure of plants as literally synonymous. Just as the rings of a tree display the number of years it has lived, so here the cells of cellulose, of which plants are composed, are literally identified with the seconds of passing time (which bend in the wind with the plant). The plant and the passing moment are locked together.
The second stanza deals with the animal world. Here the present moment is less rigid, it is an elastic membrane, but even so the lives of animals fill it to its limit in their activities of living and killing, breeding and eating. Animals can be no other than they are, can imagine nothing other than they do. They are still contained within the present.
Humans, treated in the last stanza, are both here and elsewhere, because our imaginations take us beyond the confines of our physical bodies, which are situated in the here-and-now. The first line puts the question: Where are you? The day is “falling” because the light falls from the sky, but there is also an allusion to the religious notion of “the fall of man”: whereas animals are in a sense perfect, because they can be no other than they are, human beings are imperfect, and fall short of their aspirations. The remaining three lines propose three possible answers. Sounion is a place in Greece where a famous bronze statue of the god Zeus was retrieved from the sea. Here the imagination is dragged away from the present to the ancient past. In the third line, a quartet (that is, a musical composition for a quartet of stringed instruments) distracts the hearer from the present into the disembodied emotional world of music. In the last line, a figure is imagined staring at the sky; at least, his physical body is staring at the sky, but his mind is elsewhere in time and space and does not see the sky.
“Time Out” appears in Eldershaw.
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