Patricia Carlin presents a poem by Rachel Hadas

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

Comments

[Jess P.]

This is great stuff. It's hard not to love, love, love Ray-Hay.