![]() ![]() After the cremation, Harrison goes to collect his mother’s clothing and the eternity ring is also among his mother’s belongings. This 1980 poem sees Harrison reflecting on the death of his mother, and on his father’s insistence that the eternity ring he bought for Harrison’s mother should be cremated with her body, since it was his way of ensuring that, when Harrison’s father died, he would be reunited with his wife in the afterlife. Stephen Spender called Tony Harrison’s elegies on the deaths of his parents the sort of poems he felt as if he’d waited his whole life to read. The title itself acknowledges a dual meaning: time passes and we inevitably grow older, but we also pass time doing a variety of things, caught up in the daily business of living, and we don’t always realise how much time has passed and how much we’ve changed. Here’s a short poem from probably the best-known African-American poet of the twentieth century, Maya Angelou (1928-2014). The idea of inhabiting time much as we ‘live in’ a house, say, is a novel one and encourages us to view the ‘days’ of our lives in a new way. ‘Days’ reflects, in a rather matter-of-fact way, on the deepest of questions: ‘what’s it all about?’ and ‘what is the meaning of life?’ But the recalibrating of this question in terms of ‘days’, rather than life or existence in general, points up an important and recurring theme for Larkin’s poetry: the daily ritual of work, the day-to-day business of living. The second stanza of Larkin’s poem characteristically combines the faintly comic (the priest and doctor in their long coats) with more morbid subject matter. There is nowhere we can live but in ‘days’ – that is, in the daily cycle of work and being a functioning member of society – unless we’re mad or dead. But then the very bird that had lured Eliot into the garden commands him to leave, as humans cannot bear much reality.Ĭompleted in August 1953, ‘Days’ is one of Philip Larkin’s shortest poems. Is this a nod to John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’? ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.’ Perhaps. In the garden, Eliot hears the ‘unheard music’ of the roses. In part, the poem explores an alternate reality, focusing on things which might have been but never were (the passage not taken, the door never opened). Desire is like movement, and love, by contrast, is like stillness – ‘love’ here suggesting religious devotion. How can poetry address these paradoxes and problems of time, lived experience, and spiritual meaning? A number of opposites – movement and stillness, being and not-being – are presented. The second half of this second section focuses on the notion of the ‘still point of the turning world’, which harks back to the focus of the opening section: how to live in the present moment while time is constantly moving, and the present is already becoming past (as Heraclitus, from whom Eliot takes his epigraphs for ‘Burnt Norton’, observed: everything is in constant flux). It also reflects Eliot’s conversion to Christianity (he had been received into the Church of England in 1927), and is partly about the soul’s salvation and how we might hope to be saved. In many a high and dreary sleeping place.Īs the opening lines of Eliot’s 1935 poem ‘Burnt Norton’ make clear, time is a major theme. He steals down streets where sickly arc-lights sing,Īnd wanly mock his young and shameful face That limps to cover from the angry chase, The wakened life that feels his quickening swayĪnd barnyard voices shrilling ‘It is day!’ ![]() He bears a sword of flame but not to harm The little twittering birds laugh in his way When Dawn strides out to wake a dewy farmĪcross green fields and yellow hills of hay Not the most poetic of subjects, you may think, but then ‘alarm clocks’ is a metaphor here: as Kilmer points out in a poem that is really about dawn and morning, there are various ways in which people are called to the business of their day… But he (yes, ‘Joyce’ is male in this case) also wrote others, including this fine sonnet about alarm clocks. Kilmer (1886-1918) is known for one poem: ‘ Trees’. ![]() What can clocks tell us? Quite a lot, according to Carl Sandburg in this experimental free-verse poem about the various kinds of clock he observes, from the alarm clock that gets people up at half-seven in the morning to the travel clock an actress carries around with her to various hotels.
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