Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims’ "Time’s Arrow" explores the nature of memory, language, and love in relation to the inexorable movement of time. Structured as a two-part meditation, the poem juxtaposes the loss of youthful intellectual ease with the constancy of love, which resists the arrow of time. Through its references to classical and medieval literature, shifting linguistic landscapes, and the physics of time itself, the poem presents an argument that love—unlike knowledge or memory—exists outside of temporal decay.

The first section begins with a nostalgic recollection: "The seaside lollings of our youth! One summer, / Gold as that sunflecked bevy in the dunes." The phrase "seaside lollings" evokes both leisure and ephemerality, a moment of unburdened existence by the ocean, where the sun’s reflections ("sunflecked") illuminate a "bevy in the dunes", likely a group of young women. This idyllic setting introduces an age of effortless intellectual engagement, as the speaker recalls reading most of Homer with the same ease that the surf rolls onto the shore.

But even as this golden past is invoked, its impermanence becomes apparent: "Easy as surf the lines rolled. But their tunes / Elude me now." The dactylic rhythms of Homer, once natural, now feel "cramped", signaling a loss of fluency, both in language and perhaps in youth itself. The poem moves through a series of cultural and linguistic allusions, each fading with time. "Old-Spanish / Lapses, the Cid’s deliçio dies away." The reference to El Cid, the medieval Spanish epic, signals another loss—the richness of its language and the joy (deliçio) it once provided. Similarly, Galician rains, their cómo chove, vanish—the simple phrase "how it rains" in Galician, a language of northwestern Spain, is forgotten alongside the rest.

This loss extends beyond language to literature’s emotional depths: "With Ariane, de quel amour blessée." This references the medieval Roman de Troie, where Ariadne is wounded (blessée) by love and abandonment. Just as languages and verses fade, so do the emotional resonances of literary narratives that once held deep meaning. The speaker admits, "Sometimes I turn there yet; the works are shaling / Like castles once I knew." The word "shaling" suggests erosion—texts, like sandcastles, are crumbling with time.

The reference to Sarzana, a town in Italy, adds another personal dimension, possibly a place once visited with a lover. The Italian phrase "Perché non spero" echoes the lament of T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday (Because I do not hope), reinforcing a sense of resignation. The final image of this section, "Texts, memories fail: they're tabula rasa, bare / And bleaching," likens the speaker’s mind to an erased slate, empty and sun-bleached. The erosion of knowledge and the past is inevitable.

Yet, in the turn of the poem, love remains a source of illumination: "Love, illuminate me, scroll / With your calligraphy a decrepit soul." Love, metaphorically depicted as a divine scribe, offers meaning where memory fails. It is the counterforce to time’s erosion, capable of inscribing significance onto the speaker’s aging self.

The second section expands on the contrast between the fleeting nature of time and the timeless quality of love. The phrase "That soul unburdened of the world’s detritus / Would be like vellum for your gesta, gold / And cramoisi and vert" invokes illuminated manuscripts (vellum) adorned with gold, crimson (cramoisi), and green (vert). These medieval works, painstakingly crafted, stand against the ephemeral transactions of the present: "Away from the day’s devotions, ‘bought’ and ‘sold.’" The speaker contrasts the eternal beauty of love with the mundanity of economic exchange, reducing those fixated on money to mere "spend-or-save men."

The central argument of the poem arrives with the Shakespearean reference: "'Love’s not time’s fool.'" This line from Sonnet 116 asserts that love is beyond time’s reach. But Nims extends this idea beyond poetry into physics: "You're in the primal quantum world, where time / Runs both ways indistinguishably." This alludes to the concept in quantum mechanics that, at the most fundamental level, time is symmetrical—there is no absolute direction to its flow. Unlike the arrow of time that dictates human aging and decay, love exists in a realm where "future or past, no telling. All’s at prime."

Yet, despite this assertion of timelessness, the poem’s final lines pull love back into the present: "You’re time-invariant, love. And yet somehow / Splendidly bedded in the here and now." Love may transcend time’s constraints, but it is also rooted in the immediacy of human experience. The paradox remains unresolved: love both defies time and lives within it.

"Time’s Arrow" ultimately argues that while memory, knowledge, and language deteriorate, love holds a unique position outside of time’s grasp. By blending literary, historical, and scientific references, Nims creates a meditation on love as the only force capable of resisting entropy. The sonnet’s structure—with its measured cadence and tight rhyme—mirrors the tension between time’s strict progression and love’s defiance of it. The poem suggests that while the past inevitably fades, love remains an eternal inscription, written beyond the limits of time’s arrow.

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