In Book 11 of the Confessions, Augustine attempts to contemplate the mystery of time and, in particular, the temporal embeddedness that makes human beings particularly unqualified to comprehend eternity.  Time is motion: the human mind cannot comprehend eternity directly because, says Augustine, it cannot hold still. (Confessions 11.11).  So the mystery of eternity can only be imagined in opposition to that which it is not: to temporality.  But time, though it is our only native element, proves almost as difficult to comprehend as does eternity.  The future cannot properly be said to exist because it does not exist yet, and the past no longer exists. “As for the present,” writes Augustine, “if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time but eternity.  If, therefore, the present is time only by reason of the fact that it moves on to become the past, how can we say that even the present is, when the reason why it is is that it is not to be?”  (Confessions 11.14). The present has no duration, then, no dimensions proper to itself.  It is thinner than the razor’s edge.  And yet it is full, is indeed the only fullness we shall ever in this life have.  It can only be summoned by feel.  “Suppose,” says Augustine,

that I am going to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have  removed from the province of expectation and relegated to the past now engages my  memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have   already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past. As the process continues, the province of memory is extended in proportion as that of expectation is reduced, until the whole of my expectation is absorbed . . .  (Confessions 11. 28)

And he goes further:

What is true of the whole psalm is also true of all its parts and of each syllable.  It is true of any longer action in which I may be engaged and of which the recitation of the psalm may only be a small part.  It is true of a man’s whole life, of which all his actions are parts.  It is true of the whole history of mankind, of which each man’s life is a part.

In his effort to capture the dimensionless plenitude of the present, Augustine invokes the recitation, from memory, of a psalm.  It is no accident that the example is drawn from verse rather than prose.  When he attempts to capture something about the nature of time by means of measurement, by telling time, Augustine invokes the motion of the heavenly bodies and the divisions we number according to their circuits: years, months, days, and hours.  He invokes the humbler rotations of the potter’s wheel.  He invokes, repeatedly, what he takes to be the foundational units of language:  syllables long and short, the metrical foot, the poetic line.  We do not measure a poem by pages, says Augustine, for that would be to measure in terms of space. (Confessions 11.26).  Time and space are not so easily distinguished, of course, as Augustine’s own figures of motion and stillness acknowledge.  Furthermore, and of particular interest to poets, poems-on-the-page and poems-on-the-voice have a long and intimate and sometimes convoluted relationship.  But Augustine’s thought experiment – his effort to sequester temporality for the purposes of contemplation – suggests a remarkable proposition about poetry itself:  that words and memory, words and expectation are more acutely visible in poetry than in other linguistic modes.  Put radically, it is to poetry that Augustine turns when he wishes to contemplate the reciprocal constitution of language and (human) time.

Poetry is apt for memory.  This has often been observed, usually with reference to poetry’s repeating sonic patterns.  In Augustine’s case study, the recitation of the psalm, it is necessary that the verse be already familiar, already awarded a recurrent place in consciousness. Its syllables pass through the mind and through the voice in the manner of a sacramental return, or – as in another of Augustine’s analogies – the rotation of a potter’s wheel.  The future again becoming the past again through the portal of the human.  It is in this way and this way only that we contrive to turn our face to the eternal.  Of the past, writes Augustine, all we can say of it is that it too is an aspect of the present, the present of the past, which we call memory.  And the future, or all that can be said to exist of it, which is the present of the future, we call that expectation.  So three kinds of time: the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future (Confessions 11.20). And all of these are qualities of attention. 

Among the most obvious ways in which poetry tells time is by means of the ground rhythm we call meter. “Whose woods these are, I think I know. / His house is in the village though.”  Or “Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me / Saying that now you are not as you were.”  The iamb (short long) or the dactyl (long short short) establishes itself, then repeats, conditioning the ear to expectation by means of memory and recurrence.   One sound echoes another that is still fresh in the mind; it has a past, as the earlier sound now has a future, or is made, retroactively, to have had a future once, in the past.  End rhyme is an especially potent form of sonic recurrence, and its patterns mean that language quite independent of semantics has the power to activate material anticipation as well as memory: “When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes / I all alone beweep my outcast state, / And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, / and look upon myself and curse my fate. . . .”

But what about poetry that does not rely upon meter and rhyme?  What becomes of memory and expectation then?  (And you’ll note I am still deferring the question of meaning.) Poetry that works outside the boundaries of traditional versification still has at its disposal a great formal inheritance:   In language of any sort, syntax is the vested repository of memory and anticipation, the engine of forward momentum, the thing that ties one word to another, one moment to the one to come. “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes . . .” When you encounter such a string of words you expect there to be another part of the sentence.  Syntax is a contract of expectation.  I ask you to hold on to something, to preserve it from oblivion, until the next, the complementary, thing can arrive; I promise there will be a next thing.  I may break that promise; I may bait and switch; I may set you up in one direction and swerve into another, requiring you to follow or fall off into the underbrush. But the promise, your willingness to rely upon it, my decision to honor the promise or to betray it, join us in a temporal negotiation.  We are linked in time by motion through the architecture of language.

Yes, you may say, but what about the poetry part.  Surely the language of prose is syntactical as well.  Not to mention ordinary speech.  Ah yes, but poetry has another resource, one that has the power, by means of resistance, coincidence, and modulated transitions from one  to the other, to set syntax in high relief:  it has the foundational prosodic unit of the poetic line. Syntax and lineation:  they may be conspicuously at odds, working primarily by means of interference or syncopation, as in another part of this Shakespearean sonnet. “Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth”: the counter-movement to despair is a rising movement across the line break. Syntax and lineation: they may, for a time, agree to agree and fall into step with one another.  But their alignments, in poetry worth its name, are variable and always imperfect, which serves us by making apparent the fissures of time.  I take this to be a very useful thing.  Even at its simplest, poetry is bound to double pacing.  And the gift this grants us is the present tense.  The pleasant labor of balancing one kind of momentum – the phrase, the clause, the sentence – against another – the foot, the line, the stanza – excites the faculty of attention.  When we read as when we write a poem, juggling the competing momentums of prosody and syntax, unfolding image and modulating voice, and of narrative too, for lyric poetry relies on narrative, however elliptical or relegated-to-the-whitespace it may be – juggling these competing momentums, I say, we are asked to do more than human mind can manage and, at the limit of our aptitudes, we may touch the hem of its garment, that elusive present tense:  that fleeting, always-in-motion thing.  We are made to feel that we’ve been there, or rather, that we will have been there, to apprehend its passage:  the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future, before it is entirely lost.

I've been memorizing poetry of late – 16^th and 17^th century poems, 20^th and 21^st century poems, poems written in traditional form, poems written in evolved or "discovered" form. And I voice the poems out loud, chiefly when I'm riding my bicycle on the five-mile circuit of unpaved roads near my home in Ann Arbor. (In truth, I sometimes declaim: in particular when I'm making my way, pentameter by pentameter, through the first part of Paradise Lost.) Memorization used to be easy for me, a piece of cake. It is no longer so – I have to work at it; I stumble. And I've learned to appreciate those stumbles, which tend to recur at telling junctions. Why here? I ask. And the answer is always about some surprising turn of syntax, or an ingenious imagistic variant, or a rhythmic sequence I confuse with its earlier manifestation in a different string of words. This teaches me more, and more efficiently, about the way a poem is put together than any number of silent readings might do. So that, I think, is how the poet solved that particular line break, or used it as a goad to more original thought. So that is where the poet turned away from the predictable adjective that I, in my floundering reconstruction, have supplied.

What bearing does this have on my own writing process? Well, I like to think, and it has been the foundational premise of all my teaching, that enlarging our poetic vistas and deepening our appreciation of craft will make us better writers, more flexible, less hidebound. And more importantly, returning again and again to poems I love, learning them "by heart," as we say, summoning them with lips and tongue and vocal cords, even as I pedal, day after day, the same five miles of country rounds, I grant myself, however fleetingly, fleetingly by definition, something like the present tense. What was the future becoming the past as it passes through the portal of human mindfulness. Which is what I seek and hope for in every poem I read and every poem I write.