Time and Its Passage

Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.

So leben wir und nehmen immer Abschied.

Where can we live but days?

For men may come and men may go, But I go on forever.

 

I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.

 

Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.

 

Take your delight in momentariness, Walk between dark and dark—a shining space With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.

Come night, strike hour. Days go, I endure. 4

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

When I consider how my light is spent,

The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light forever shines, earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments—Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

Time marks us while we are marking time.

Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race,

Life is a frail moth flying / Caught in the web of the years that pass.

From morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day; and with the setting sun Dropp’d from the zenith like a falling star.

O time! swift devourer of all created things!

If you trap the moment before it’s ripe, The tears of repentance you’ll certainly wipe; But if once you let the ripe moment go You can never wipe off the tears of woe.

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o’clock has the whole afternoon ruined for him already.

It was my thirtieth year to heaven.

Ah! the clock is always slow;

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a Way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.

He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Thou hast nor youth nor age; But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep, Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich, Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty, To make thy riches pleasant.