Sonnet: to Time
Sonnet: to Time - meaning Summary
Time as Relentless Machine
Plath’s sonnet confronts time and mortality, contrasting glossy modern life with older, mournful images. The poem moves from jeweled clocks and a casual steel car to an outside wind and ancient scenes of a pagan girl and a dragon. These shifts underline a sense of exclusion and universal sorrow. Time is finally personified as a harsh, iron machine that relentlessly drains even the stars, collapsing glamour into loss.
Read Complete AnalysesToday we move in jade and cease with garnet Amid the ticking jeweled clocks that mark Our years. Death comes in a casual steel car, yet We vaunt our days in neon and scorn the dark. But outside the diabolic steel of this Most plastic-windowed city, I can hear The lone wind raving in the gutter, his Voice crying exclusion in my ear. So cry for the pagan girl left picking olives Beside a sunblue sea, and mourn the flagon Raised to toast a thousand kings, for all gives Sorrow; weep for the legendary dragon. Time is a great machine of iron bars That drains eternally the milk of stars.
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