A Dance to the Music of Time

A Dance to the Music of Time, Nicholas Poussin, ca. 1638.

August à la Poussin

                  by Louis MacNeice

The shutter of time darkening ceaselessly

Has whisked away the foam of may and elder

And I realise how now, as every year before,

Once agan the gay months have eluded me.

For the mind, by nature stagey, welds its frame

Tomblike around each little world of a day;

We jump from picture to picture and cannot follow

The living curve that is breathlessly the same.

While the lawn-mower sings moving up and down

Spirting its little fountain of vivid green,

I, like Poussin, make a still-bound fête of us

Suspending every noise, of insect or machine.

Garlands at a set angle that do not slip

Theatrically (and as if forever) grace

You and me and the stone god in the garden

And Time who also is shown with a stone face.

But all this is a dilettante’s lie.

Timés face is not stone nor still his wings,

Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time die

For we being ghosts cannot catch hold of things.