Triple Time - Analysis

The poem’s central claim: the same scene contains three different times

Triple Time insists that a single ordinary moment can’t be pinned down as merely now. The speaker looks at This empty street and a sky to blandness scoured, and says these details constitute the present. But almost immediately the poem refuses to let the present stay singular. The same street and air also form the furthest future a child once imagined, and, later, will harden into the past. Larkin’s claim is quietly unsettling: time doesn’t just pass; it relabels the same material world, and each label changes what the scene means—and what it accuses us of.

The present: a season that feels like a judgment

The first stanza paints the present as a kind of sanctioned disappointment. The sky has been scoured until it’s bland, and the air is indistinct with autumn, as if the world has lost definition. Even the simile Like a reflection makes the moment feel secondhand—real, but thinned out. The speaker calls it A time traditionally soured, and unrecommended by event: nothing is happening, and that nothingness seems culturally familiar, almost prescribed by the season. The tone is dry, slightly bruised; the present is not dramatic misery, but a flatness that invites resignation.

The turn: the “empty street” becomes childhood’s furthest future

Then the poem pivots: But equally they make up something else. That equally matters—the present isn’t more real than what memory and expectation do to it. The same sensory items—houses, skies, air—are reinterpreted as the future childhood once “saw”: Between long houses, under travelling skies, with contending bells in the distance. The street that was empty a moment ago fills with imagined adulthood: An air lambent with adult enterprise. Lambent makes the air glow, but it’s a particular glow: not romance, not spiritual revelation, but the bright hum of purposeful grown-up activity. The tension here is sharp: the present feels vacant, yet it is also the very image that once promised fullness.

What the child got wrong—and what the adult can’t stop seeing

The second stanza doesn’t simply say the child was hopeful; it shows how hope is built from the same materials that will later look depleted. Childhood’s future is “furthest” not because it is grand, but because it lies at the edge of what a child can picture: ordinary streets, bells, moving weather. There’s tenderness in those travelling skies, but also a faint irony: the adult speaker can now see that the supposed glow of adult enterprise is just another atmosphere, another mood laid over the same brick and air. The contradiction tightens: adulthood is imagined as busy and radiant, yet the adult’s actual present is unrecommended by event. The poem suggests that part of growing up is inheriting the child’s picture of adulthood—and then discovering you are living in its dimmer version.

The future past: “neglected chances” and the urge to blame

The final stanza lands hardest because it imagines today as tomorrow’s regret. on another day this scene will be the past, and the landscape shifts into metaphor: A valley cropped by fat neglected chances. The word fat makes the missed opportunities feel plentiful, almost grazing within reach, while neglected blames not fate but inattention. The speaker admits we insensately forbore to fleece them—an oddly practical, almost rural verb that makes the failure sound like leaving money on the table. And then comes the self-protective reflex: On this we blame our last / Threadbare perspectives. Instead of owning the neglect, we claim our viewpoint was worn out, as if perception itself frayed. The closing seasonal decrease links personal diminishment to the calendar again: autumn isn’t just weather but an alibi, a way to explain why everything seems to shrink.

A sharper question the poem won’t let go of

If the present is already childhood’s future and the future’s past at once, what excuse is left for drifting through it unrecommended by event? The poem’s bleak wit is that we will later call our missed chances fat—obvious, abundant—while right now we experience the same day as thin air and bland sky.