Special Section: A Group-Analytic Exploration of Time

contd.

Time in Literature
Sue Stuart-Smith
The subject of Time is one of the great themes of Literature. It is
intrinsic to so many aspects of what it is to be human – the
transience of beauty, loss and mourning, the importance of memory,
hopes for the future and the nature of the creative act itself. Within
a short space of time, it can only be possible to touch on some
aspects of its representation in Western literature and for the most
part I will focus on poetry.
Key words: carpe diem (‘seize the day’), literature, poets, Shake-
speare, time

Almost exactly 2000 years ago, Ovid was writing what was later to
become his most famous work, a narrative poem which brings
together Greek and Roman mythology. In the Metamorphoses
(1955), as it is called, Time is personified as ‘the devourer’ who
‘destroys all things’, yet this work has itself survived the ravages of
time and is very much alive now, parts of it recently translated by
the poet Ted Hughes (1997). The Metamorphoses was also
undoubtedly known to Shakespeare and the image of Time ‘the
devourer’ is one of the central themes in Shakespeare’s sonnet
cycle. Shakespeare is concerned with time and mutability through-
out his writing, from his earliest poems to his late plays. He is
concerned with the relationship of individual passions, ambitions
and weaknesses to the passing of time. His early poem, the Rape of
Lucrece (1976), contains an Invocation to Time, as well as a
description of how Lucrece’s trauma and grief affects her experi-
ence of time passing.
In the sonnet cycle we find an expression of various and even

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contradictory views of man’s relationship to the passing of time.

Some of the sonnets are written in the tradition of the carpe diem
(seize the day) love poems of the 16th and 17th centuries, in which
the poet typically urges his loved one to grasp the moment and
enjoy the pleasures of the flesh before it is too late. One of the best
known of these is by Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress (1978,
pp. 50–51). Shakespeare’s Sonnet number 60 develops the carpe
diem theme in a different way. Here, it is the transformative power
of art, rather than (or maybe as well as) the pleasures of the flesh,
which represents the possibility of rescuing our experiences from
the inevitable passing of time.
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,
Crooked eclipses ’gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth;
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand. (1976: Vol. IV, p. 490)

It is probably true that the drive to create something which outlives

its creator inspires much artistic endeavour. But in spite of this
sonnet’s resolution, it is hard to believe that Shakespeare could
possibly have conceived just how long his verses would stand
against time’s ‘scythe’, even more remarkable when you consider
that he did little himself in the way of seeking their survival through
publication. Most of his work was only published posthumously.
During the course of Shakespeare’s life, the mechanical measure-
ment of time became increasingly widespread. In place of sand
clocks, sundials and the passing of the seasons, time began to be
measured with a new objective accuracy. Shakespeare is one of the
first writers to explore how the subjective experience of living in
time can sometimes be at variance with the external passage
of time. Our internal experience of time varies from moment to
moment according to our states of mind and stages of the life cycle,
as this extract from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It (Act 3: Scene
2) illustrates:
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Rosalind I pray you, what is ’t o’clock?

Orlando You should ask me what time o’ day. There’s no clock in the
forest.
Rosalind Then there is no true lover in the forest, else
Sighing every minute and groaning every hour would detect the
lazy foot of time as well as a clock.
Orlando And why not the swift foot of time? Had not that been as proper?
Rosalind By no means, sir. Time travels in divers paces
With divers persons. I’ll tell you who time ambles withal, who time
trots withal, who time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal.
Orlando I prithee, who doth he trot withal?
Rosalind Marry, he trots hard with a young maid between the contract of her
marriage and the day it is solemnized. If the interim be but a se’nnight,
time’s pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven year.
Orlando Who ambles time withal?
Rosalind With a priest that lacks Latin, and a rich man that hath not the gout; for
the one sleeps easily because he cannot study, and the other lives
merrily because he feels no pain, the one lacking the burden of lean
and wasteful learning, the other knowing no burden of heavy tedious
penury. These time ambles withal.
Orlando Who doth he gallop withal?
Rosalind With a thief to the gallows; for though he go as softly as foot can fall,
he thinks himself too soon there.
Orlando Who stays it still withal?
Rosalind With lawyers in the vacation; for they sleep between term and term,
and then they perceive not how time moves. (1976: Vol. I, p. 514)

At various critical moments in our lives, time may be perceived

to speed up or to slow down. Sometimes the past, present and even
an apprehension of the future, can be simultaneously perceived. In
different ways Shakespeare’s plays explore man’s relationship to
the past and the present, as well as to the future. Hamlet is
preoccupied by the past, as represented by his father’s ghost;
Macbeth, by that of the future, as represented by the witches’
prophecies. For Hamlet, ‘the time is out of joint’ (1976: Vol. III,
p. 502), for Macbeth, ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
creeps in this petty pace from day to day’ (1976: Vol. III, p. 453).
Cleopatra, looks back to the time when ‘eternity was in our lips and
eyes’ (and Richard II regrets the fact that he ‘wasted time, and now
doth time waste me’; 1976: Vol. II, p. 126).
In his late plays, Shakespeare experiments with time in the formal
structure of the plays. In The Winter’s Tale (1976: Vol. I, pp. 759–
834) Time is personified, so that a long interval of time can be
passed over, and the anticipated tragic ending is reversed. In The
Tempest (1976: Vol. I, pp. 7–59) the course of time runs in parallel
 Stuart-Smith: Time in Literature 221

to the drama of the play and alone of all Shakespeare’s plays it is

acted out in the theatre in approximately the same amount of time as
the action the play depicts.
It is not until the advent of the Romantic poets that the subjective
experience of time is again explored in any great depth. In The
Prelude (1933), written in 1805, Wordsworth describes the growth
of the poet’s mind, his own mind, and he develops the idea that
there are crucial moments of experience, often in childhood, which
remain in our memories as a potential source of future mental
growth and understanding. One of the metaphors he uses to describe
this is that of ‘the island in the stream’; whilst the external stream of
time may be unstoppable, these redeeming moments become islands
of time in the mind. He also refers to them as ‘spots of time’:
There are in our existence spots of time,
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain,
A vivifying virtue whence depressed,
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. (1933: 213)

In the 20th century, a number of Modernist writers, including James

Joyce and Virginia Woolf, develop the Wordsworth-style notion of
‘spots of time’. There is an attempt by these writers to recreate the
experience of time within the stream of consciousness. No one did
this more so than Proust (1983), and the famous Madeleine in
Remembrance of Things Past represents just such a ‘spot in time’. In
these intense moments of experience, memory and the senses
combine, so that time is perceived as moving vertically, rather than
horizontally, much like the ancient Greek notion of Kairos. Joyce
calls them ‘epiphanies’ and for Woolf they are ‘moments of being’
which are like ‘matches struck unexpectedly in the dark’.
The modernist poet T.S. Eliot also explored the experience of
time and it is a central theme in The Four Quartets (1948). Here, I
want to consider The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock (1948) as it is
the antithesis of a carpe diem (sieze the day) poem. Prufrock is
unable to make a proposal of marriage to the woman he loves
because he is in a state of obsessional doubt: ‘In a minute there is
222 Group Analysis 36(2)

time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.’ And
in the poem he watches his own life passing him by, he has ‘known
the evenings, mornings, afternoons, /I have measured out my life
with coffee spoons’. For Prufrock, there are no ‘islands in the
stream’, there is no seizing of the moment; he is becalmed on
the sea of time.
It seems fitting to end on a contemporary poet – a writer of our
own time. In the poem Moments of Grace (1994), Carol Ann Duffy
skilfully brings together a number of the familiar themes about the
passing of time. In the course of the poem she moves backwards
and forwards between the present and her memories of first love and
elaborates on what she calls ‘moments of grace’ which are related to
Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’: ‘Memory’s caged bird won’t fly.
These days / We are adjectives, nouns. In moments of grace/ We
were verbs, the secret of poems, talented’. In the last verse, there is
the unavoidable sense of loss that an awareness of time and ageing
brings with it as well as the possibility of redemption in the
present:
Now I take off my watch, let a minute unravel
In my hands, listen and look as I do so,
And mild loss opens my lips like No.
Passing, you kiss the back of my neck. A blessing.

References
Duffy, C.A. (1994) Selected Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association
with Anvil Press.
Eliot, T.S. (1948) Selected Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association
with Faber and Faber.
Hughes, T. (1997) Tales from Ovid. London: Faber and Faber.
Marvell, A. (1978) The Complete Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Ovid (1955) Metamophoses, trans. Mary M. Innes. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Classics.
Proust, Marcel (1983) Remembrance of Things Past, trans. Terence Kilmartin, vol. I.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Shakespeare, W. (1976) The Complete Works. London: J.M. Dent and Sons. (Heron
Books imprint).
Wordsworth, W. (1933) The Prelude (Text, 1805). Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Sue Stuart-Smith is a Specialist Registrar in Psychotherapy at the Tavistock

Clinic and Royal Free Hospital in London. Before training in Medicine and
Psychiatry, she read English Literature at Cambridge University. Author’s
address for correspondence: The Adult Department, The Tavistock Clinic, 120
Belsize Lane, London NW3, UK.