The New Song

For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then

there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song

Editor’s note: This is a poem about how the poet’s felt sense of time has changed over a lifetime — and with it his senses of continuity and novelty. But that doesn’t do the poem justice: it takes the poem intellectually, and Merwin isn’t much of an intellectual. Rather than propose ideas about time, novelty, change, he feels the ideas and the strange habits of longing that go along with dwelling on them. —Adam Plunkett