This week’s poem, “Daylight Saving” by Rachel Hadas,
appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of
Barrow Street:
DAYLIGHT SAVING
It’s time to change the time.
I’ve set the clocks ahead–
all but one, antique,
haughty on a high shelf,
that doesn’t really run
but keeps its time to itself,
though it emits if touched
a crotchety, cracked chime.
My wristwatch will be last
to dutifully spring
forward–and we’re all set,
as they say in
Vermont.
But wait:
My son is heading out.
Be home by one, I say.
And he replies: Okay,
one by the old time.
I wait in the slow zone
while he floats through another.
Is he an hour late?
Am I an hour ahead?
Either way, old mother,
it’s time to go to bed.
The sleepy-feeling pace
(I turn a page and yawn)
is an illusion:
Everyone’s time runs out
at a single rate.
Not early and not late,
my son’s abruptly back.
-- Rachel Hadas
“Daylight Saving” is a model for what meter and thyme can
accomplish in the right hands. I admire
and take pleasure in the consummate craft of this poem, and in how lightly that
craft is deployed to deliver meaning. At
the risk of weighting the poem down, I’ll mention just a few of its elements.
The poem’s base meter is iambic trimeter.
Regular meter is pleasing in itself and also appropriate
to the poem’s subject: a meditation on time.
Fixed meter ticks on, as does clock time.
But the poet varies the meter with great
skill: the pleasure of repetition fixed meter gives is leavened just enough with
the pleasure of surprise in departure from that meter.
At times trochaic feet substitute for iambic
feet (“haughty on a high shelf,”
“one by
the old time,” to give a few examples).
At other times – key moments in the poem in terms of meaning – the poem
departs altogether from trimeter lines (“But wait,” “is an illusion”).
Rhyme in the poem doesn’t operate like
clockwork either.
End rhymes are few and
don’t recur in any fixed pattern, so I’m pleasantly surprised whenever one appears.
The rhymes seem to chime through the poem
like the “crotchety cracked chime” of the antique clock.
Both the mostly regular meter and the recurrence of rhyme
subtly carry the poem’s message of time passing at a fixed rate.
In spite of variation the base meter ticks
steadily away, and rhyme keeps coming back.
This effect is reinforced because certain rhyming words having to do
with time’s ticking repeat: “time’ – “chime” – “time” in the first section, and
“rate” – “late” – “rate” in the second section.
But none of this is intrusive: all is handled with the lightest of
touches.
There’s life wisdom in the poem –an acceptance of time and
generational difference running under the poem’s delightful surface. The poem
works through a seemingly slight anecdote.
In the night of clock change a mother waits for her son to return.
Are we in the son’s expanded hour of old
time, or in the mother’s foreshortened hour of daylight saving?
Is the mother early, or the son late? “Either
way, old mother, / it’s time to go to bed.”
These two lines evoke, in the lightest possible way, generational
change.
Meter and rhyme create a parallel to the anecdote.
While I read I experience moments of
departure from the clock-work regularity of fixed meter and rhyme.
But as with the mother’s sense of suspended
time (“a sleepy-feeling pace”), it’s a momentary “illusion.”
Like the son’s abrupt return, back come the
iambs, and back come the rhymes.
For mother
and son and the reader, time is ticking away “at a single rate.”
The poem is a meditation on time, delivered in the guise of
a charming anecdote; and all elements serve to impart that meditation in an
experiential way.
The light surface of
the poem conceals its deep craft.
-- Patricia Carlin
