Each New Hour’s Passage
Each new hour’s passage is the acolyte
Of inarticulate song and syllable,
And every passing moment is a bell,
To mourn the death of undiscerned delight.
Where is the sun that made the noon-day bright,
And where the midnight moon? O let us tell,
In long carved line and painted parable,
How the white road curves down into the night.
Only to build one crystal barrier
Against this sea which beats upon our days;
To ransom one lost moment with a rhyme,
Or, if fate cries and grudging gods demur,
To clutch Life’s hair, and thrust one naked phrase
Like a lean knife between the ribs of Time.
Time passes and threatens to overturn all we have struggled to achieve. Our home falls into ruin; our business goes bust; even our body starts to fail.
(Liza Voronin/The Epoch Times)
The poem begins with two perplexing statements – two images of time that are worth reflecting on. Firstly, the “passage” of every hour is “the acolyte/ Of inarticulate song and syllable”. Secondly, “Every passing moment is a bell,/ To mourn the death of undiscerned delight.”
Time wants us dead-beat, drowsy and undiscerning. The “acolyte of inarticulate song”? When I first read this, I saw in my mind a follower of the Greek god Dionysus: a drunken fool ready to be slain. This classical figure was then replaced by its modern day equivalent: a drug-addicted rock-star groupie with a blank, unfocused stare.
It is only by polluting our consciousness that we cleanse the doors of perception. So runs the claim. The lucid mind is a limitation, and it is by plunging into chaos that we come closer to the truth… Time and again, however, this nonsensical creed results in squalid self-destruction.
The truth is that the lucid mind is our greatest gift – and our greatest adventure. This is the mind free to think clearly, the mind we experience when the sun first shines, or after meditation. Remaining still and aware, we refine our ability to focus – the foundation of our free will.
Such a mind is always accompanied by a rush of happiness. Undaunted by distractions, we come to know a sense of order in the world and an inner purposefulness. We are no longer an acolyte, driven by another’s tune, but sovereign over ourselves. We become an individual.
Douglas suggests that our life threatens to be spent in perpetual mourning for the days that are gone, in that endless procession of “sun” and “midnight moon,” unless we redeem the time through the blood and sweat of creation. This is how I interpret: ‘O let us tell/, In long carved line and painted parable,/ How the white road curves down into the night.’
Darkness ends the first part of the sonnet; the second begins with light. The beautiful image of the “crystal barrier” to protect us from the sea of time evokes civilization at its most radiant. After our labors, we feel the calm, uplifting presence of Apollo in contrast to turbulent Dionysius. Yet do we fear this sanctuary will one day break and death will come rushing in?
Defense can turn into attack, however. In the next image, we are seen to kidnap “one lost moment” and hold it to ransom. We take it with that most hypnotic of charms, a rhyme.
What do we want in return? Life – life at its most intense. Poetry transforms the vanished past into an ecstatic vision, something permanent we can pass on to our children in the collective consciousness of language, where the living and the dead are one.
Who are we bargaining with? Destiny itself. Both “fate” and the “grudging gods” represent the absolute – what we cannot change. So what can we do if life refuses to meet our demand?
Carpe diem. In the final lines, Douglas brutally dramatizes the Roman injunction to seize the day. We yank life back by the hair, and “thrust one naked phrase/ like a lean knife’ into its ribs. Transfixing the flow of impermanence with a memorable phrase that leaps, like lightning, beyond the moment and down through the ages, we kill time and attain immortal glory.
Alfred Douglas (1870–1945) was an English author, poet and translator. This sonnet is taken from the sequence, The City of the Soul.
