Essay on Time

Have you ever faced a moment in your life that matured you? Or made you cognizant of the harsh realities of life? Moments like these tend to result in the loss of innocence...and the undertaking of a burden called adulthood. These moments happen at different times and in different ways for different people. Therefore the reaction one person may have to such a loss may be markedly different from another's. In the poem "Time", the speaker is a man whose moment of innocence was the end of the world for him. Thus, his view of the effect of lost innocence for a hypothetical, abstract boy he portrays is negative. The fact that the abstract boy's loss of innocence is portrayed as being somber illustrates that the speaker feels on a whole that the loss of innocence is a terrible thing. Personification in "Time" is used to portray the innocence of both the abstract boy and the speaker as a boy; the diction used is meant to illustrate the fact that losing innocence is a universal occurrence; and lastly, the form and punctuation helps to highlight certain nuances of the loss of innocence.

The use of personification establishes the innocence of the boy in stanza one and the innocence of the speaker himself in the second stanza--an innocence which will be lost by both at the conclusion of each stanza. The "empty boxcars waiting" (1-2) is an early, subtle instance of personification which suggests the imaginative thoughts of the boy being told about. His innocence is more exposed however in the following line's use of personification, "the tall grass tickles their bellies" (3), which is dually effective. On one level, this is a powerful line because it shows the boy's childlike tendency to give life to objects. On the other, this line is powerful because it evokes in the reader a sense of childhood nostalgia--a time where belly tickling (presumably) occurred more often. In the second stanza, the speaker gives voice to his past self. As a boy, the "grass lived" (12-13) and the "trains whistled" (13) in his world of childlike wonderment. Moments later, the speaker as a boy, witnesses a river "choked" (14) with old vehicles. The personification of a "choked" river here, is perhaps the very last time the speaker had personified an object. This can't be known for sure, but the choking suggests a death, not just of the river, but of innocence. The punctuation in this line--which will be covered in more detail later--also suggests that fact. Thus, the personification in the first stanza-- abundant in the first half of stanza one and nonexistent in the second half--suggests the death of the future boy's childlike imagination (and consequently, his innocence); while the personified, figurative death of the river in stanza two illustrates the death of the speaker's innocence.

The diction in "Time" points to the universality of the loss of innocence and how every youth (no matter what generation) will experience this loss. The poem starts off with a glimpse into the future, "The years to come..." (1), where a boy will "clamber" (5) up on top of an empty boxcar and "gaze" (8) upon a river. The use of the word "will" twice in the first stanza--as in "will sometime stay" (4) and "will run" (6)--signifies that the events being described have yet to happen. It should be asked: How does the speaker know of events that have yet to happen? The answer is because he has already lived through similar events in his youth, and further, he has come to the understanding that at some point every youth will face what he himself went through. In the second stanza the speaker remarks about his past as a boy and how he "took that kind of walk" (11) out to where the trains were, a place where he discovered his very own river.  The implications of the river will be analyzed later, for now the focus will be on "that kind of walk" (11) he took. His walk in the past is a direct parallel to the "run[ning] along the top" (6-7) of the boxcars being done by the boy of the future. This is because the running being done by the boy of the future occurs right before the boy gazes into the river; likewise the walking done by the speaker in his past occurs right before he sees his own river. What the boy of the future sees in his river is not made explicit, while the speaker's river is "choked with old Chevies and Fords" (14). What's important, however, is the effect the river had on the speaker...the day he witnessed the "choked" river "was the day the world ended" (15) for him. There is a clear parallel being made between the end of the second stanza (the speaker's past)--where the words "ended" and "river" are found--and the end of the first stanza (the future of a boy) where "end" and "river" are found, as in "gaze down at the end into that river" (8). Effectively, through diction, the speaker was able to foreshadow the future (the boy's unique "end of the world" event) based on his own past experience with the "end of the world", which--in the bigger picture--illustrates the inevitability of the loss of innocence.

The form and punctuation employed in the poem subtely pinpoints the different phases in which the process of becoming an adult (or losing innocence) occurs. The last phase--which will be called the rumination phase--is chronologically first in the poem. The speaker ruminates that the "years to come" (1) will "[in] sometime stay, rusted still" (4). Before the presence of the semi-colon ending line 4 is explained, it must be remarked that the first half of stanza one is filled with words that connote oldness/physical maturation/immobility, such as: "empty" (1), "waiting" (2), "forgets" (2), "stay" (4), "rusted" (4), and "still" (4). The presence of the semi-colon--a punctuation mark that most often links two independent clauses closely related in thought, but that are often opposites in nature--is appropriate after this first half characterized by oldness, because the second half that follows is full of words that connote youth/mobility, such as: "little" (5), "boy" (5), "clambers" (5), "run" (6), "along" (7), "jump" (7). In short, the poet's semi-colon marks a direct shift in pace, time, (im)maturity that allows the reader to more clearly separate the rumination phase from the pre-maturation phase.

Secondarily--concerning form and punctuation--the poet plays with enjambment, indentation, and end-stopped lines to highlight various nuances of the loss of innocence.The enjambment of line 8--"and gaze down...that rive" (8)--into line 9, "near every town" (9), places dramatic emphasis on line 9. This calculated emphasis is crucial to the poem because this line singularily illustrates the speaker's argument: that the loss of innocence is universal. The meaning of the river--as noted previously--is directly connected to a young person's loss of innocence. Following this understanding, if a river--metaphorically-- is in every town, every young person will encounter it and thus lose their innocence--clearly depicting the universality of innocence lost. The indentation of line 10, "Once when I was a boy" (10)--aside from marking the narrative of a new boy (the speaker himself)--suggests a vast distance between the speaker as a boy and the speaker as he is now, an old man with a vastly different worldview. This distance, thus, is indicative of the disconnect between himself and the days of his youth. The last major effect--end-stopped lines--dovetails well with the effect of the punctuation, thus both devices will be addressed together. The most important instance of end-stopping occurs in the last two lines of the poem, "The river was choked with old Chevies and Fords./And that was the day the world ended" (14-15). Very obviously the use of endstopping emboldens the word "ended" (15). However, the more powerful end-stop--ending with a period--occurs in line 14, where the line--which could have flowed into the dependent clause--is cut short. A cutting short that may give one the feeling of something (a life, for example) being cut prematurely, or to be more graphic, a river choking to death. The river's death implies the death of the speaker's inner boy--a way of life taken way too soon that will never be renewed. This explanation is exactly why line 15 "And that was the day the world ended" (15) is the perfect way to end this poem.

Indeed, the end of the world at the end of "Time" is the perfect thought for this poem to end with being as though, textually, the loss of innocence is the death of something happy and blissfully ignorant. The jaded tone of the speaker suggests the heavy toll the burden of knowledge and adulthood takes on him. For the speaker to ruminate on the future of a boy who has yet to exist illustrates somewhat of an obsession with his own past as a boy, which he felt was ruined by the realization/witnessing of something that remains ambiguous. Through personification, diction, form and punctuation, the poet is able to establish a speaker whose view of innocence lost as a totally negative thing.