Time Eating Essay

1090 Words5 Pages
Time eating by Keith Douglas is a poem that deals with the exploration of the concept of time, personifying it as an animal, a monster. From the narrator’s point of view, time is a negative aspect of his life, one that took away his love and led to his perception of the world being miserable and hopeless. In the first stanza, time is being introduced as “Ravenous Time”, from this we can already derive its negative connotations. Time that is greedy and vicious. This then gives rise to the idea of time having a persistent hunger, in the context of the poem, a hunger for life. “Ravenous Time has flowers for his food” This image shows us the cruelty of time, where time takes away things even as delicate as flowers. “yet can cleverly make good each petal” suggests that while time has the ability to take away life, it is also able to make a flower beautiful, ironically. This could be a small-scale representation of how through time, despite whatever comes, everything can become better. Time “devours animals and men, but for ten dead he can create ten.” The narrator talks about how time can “devour” living things, wiping them off the surface of this earth, but also having the power of granting life, and bringing new life back. The narrator deals with the question of the growing and aging of humans in the second stanza. “If you enquire how secretly you’ve come to mansize from the bigness of a stone.” He first offers this question to the readers to ponder, how time can turn a human from a baby to an adult, from the “bigness of a stone” to the size you are now. He then answers it, offering reasoning, “it will appear it’s his art made you rise so gradually to your proper size.” We owe our physical transformation in life to time, time’s art has made us what we are today. However, stanza three shows that whatever time creates, it can also be taken away, in contrast to
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