It's About Time: Poems that Explore Our Relationship with the Clock

The start of another year always puts our focus on the concept of time. Some of us buy new calendars and day planners. (If you're like me, you're laying out your bullet journal). We compost what was learned from the previous year, and we plant new goals or intentions like tiny seeds. Perhaps an astrology report or a tarot spread sprinkles some insight into what might lie ahead.

Astrology Frans Floris (1515-1570)

Even though every great spiritual teacher has told us that peace is only found in the present moment, most of us spend much of our lives looking forwards or backwards. Thus, time and how we use it (or perceive it) is one of the great themes and perplexing issues that poets love to tackle. Let's look at a few examples.

Time Personified

How often have we watched a clock, wanting it to go slower or faster? I love how Sandburg turns the tables by having the clocks become the impassive observers of human life.

Here's another example of personification. In Joy Ladin's "Time Passes," we see time being afraid of passing and feeling the difficulties of being leathery and slow. Notice how ageing is being shown through time's loss of certain childhood activities like sneaking, hiding, and running. Time feels relatable in this poem, more like a lifelong friend who is traveling along beside us. We can feel sympathy here, rather than viewing time as the enemy.

Advice on How to Deal with Time

In Philip Larkin's poem, "Days," the reader is immediately confronted with the question, "What are days for?" Larkin then answers that days "are to be happy in" and asks, "Where can we live but days?" Then he ends with a sardonic twist in the second stanza with the priest and the doctor running to solve the question. We often want someone else, someone with authority, to tell us why and how to live, rather than looking within to cultivate our own kind of happiness and make our days worthwhile.

Charles Baudelaire doles out similar advice in "Be Drunk," which is not so much an endorsement for alcohol abuse, but rather a call to be drunk on life itself.

We can't know exactly what another year holds for us, but we can decide how much or how little we make of time, and like the poets before us, we can dance with it on the page.

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Writing Prompts

1. Write a poem after Sandburg's "Clocks." Pick a few clocks, perhaps one at your office or a relative's living room or one in your town square, and describe specific scenes that the clocks are seeing.

2. The expression "Father Time" comes from Greek mythology in which Chronos and Saturn are both depicted as old men with sickles cutting down the past year. What if time was a mother or grandmother figure instead? Write a poem from her perspective.

3. Use Larkin's opening line "What are days for?" as a prompt and answer the question in your own poem.

4. Write a poem about feeling intoxicated on something other than substances. What helped you to escape becoming a martyred slave of time if only briefly?

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