‘Time,’ a Poem by Jason Morton

Here’s another poem by Jason Morton, whose work I’ve analyzed before. I’ve put the text in italics to distinguish it from my own writing.

Time

Everything
Is nothing
It’s the truth of time
Where songs are sung by the dead
And then are transformed into lullabies
Nothing
Is everything
It’s sad to say this is true
Where hearts were giving in surrender
And I once cared for you
Now I let go
Never will i trust again
And i reach the end
Soul divine
In a matter of perspective
I perceive the threat of time.

And now, for my analysis.

“Everything/Is nothing” can be interpreted to mean that everything in life is inherently worthless; but I tend to see it dialectically, as Hegel did in his Science of Logic. He used ‘being,’ ‘nothing,’ and ‘becoming’ to represent an example of what is popularly labelled ‘thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.’

The point is that time, like everything, is in constant movement, and so things constantly arise and pass away. Everything becomes nothing, then nothing becomes new things, or a new set of everything, so “Nothing/Is everything.” So we move from everything to nothing, then back again, in cycles. What is so painful about time is seeing the people and things we love die off. Also, new pains emerge from nothingness.

Chronos, the personification of time, which consumes everything, changing it into nothing, has sometimes been equated with Cronus, or Saturn, who in Greek myth devoured his children. This eating of children can be associated with the ravages of destructive time.

Life is painful because those things we want to have last forever, cannot. “Songs are sung by the dead/And then are transformed into lullabies”: these are the dreams we have of what we’ve lost coming back to us in a wish-fulfillment. But when we wake up, we see our dreams were illusions, “Where hearts were giving in surrender.”

Note how when the writer “let[s] go,” the first-person I changes to lower-case i. This is deliberate: “Never will i trust again/And i reach the end.” Lower-case i here can be see to represent a standing human figure, but with the head separate from the body, indicating a fragmented soul. He’ll never again trust the love of one who has betrayed him, be that a former lover, or the God he’s lost faith in.

“Soul divine” thus could be an ironic reference to a Christian belief now abandoned, or to the divine beauty of a lost love, or it could be a reference to mythical Saturn, in whom one “perceive[s] the threat of time.” After all, nothing kills more slowly, more softly, more painfully, than time.