The Passing of the Year Time Quotes

This is kind of a cool idea.  We like the thought of a guy sitting in his room, waiting to feel something like the changing of the year.  If you really paid attention, do you think you could feel a thing like that?  Maybe this poem is designed to get you close to that, to zero you in on a moment, to heighten your senses so that you can feel the passage of time.

See how this whole "life is a theater" idea works?  Service is going to make sure you do, because he's about to go nuts with this metaphor.  Still, let's take a second and think about how it fits together.  In this line, he's comparing time to a stage where the action of life happens.  Time is the platform, the base for everything.  We actually think it matters a lot that the speaker uses the word "time" here.  He could have said the "Stage of Life" or something like that, but what he really wants us to focus on it the feeling of time rolling by us.

"Moment" is another important time word.  We're just a moment away from the end of the year – in an instant it will disappear forever.  Still, what the poet can do is freeze that moment, stretch it out for as long as he wants.  He basically stops time. In saving this stretched-out moment in time, he prevents it from getting swept away.  It's actually one of the neat super-powers of poetry, this ability to play with time.  OK, so we don't think Poetry-Man is going to be the next big Marvel Comics franchise, although if they go that way, we've got some ideas for costumes…

This poor guy, who our speaker thinks is a criminal, really seems to have the weight of the past pressing down on him.  Luckily, the poem doesn't spend too much time on this, or it could get depressing.  Still, we think that the idea that time can be a burden, that it can "condemn" you, is an important theme in this poem.  Maybe things haven't gotten that bad for the speaker yet, but he seems to be leaning that way.

We don't want to get too spacey on you, but there are at least a couple different kinds of time working in this poem.  There's the clock time of the world, which is moving along.  There's also poem-time (you like that? we just made it up) because every poem has to have a beginning middle and end.  In this line, the poem time and the clock time are coming together.  It's "time" for the "weary year" to go, because it's getting near midnight, but also because the poem is ending.