Today’s Poem: Early in the Morning

Spots of Time in a poem by Robert Hillyer

Konstantin Korovin, Café de la Paix à Paris, c. 1925 (Wikimedia Commons)

Over the past two years, my fellow Poems Ancient and Modern founder Sally Thomas and I have been in conversation about what I dubbed “Spots of Time poetry.” What started us off was Edward Thomas’s “Adlestrop,” as we tried to identify what made the poem so memorable, but our intermittent discussions soon spread to consider many other works — including Today’s Poem, Robert Hillyer’s “Early in the Morning.”

This is an idea in process, an ongoing critical attempt to define the way in which certain poems present a memory — but not just any memory. The recollection is not offered in the poem for its symbolic value or as some melancholy or ironic illustration of the gap between past and present. The memory is not even offered primarily as a memory. It is instead a flash of recognition of a previous moment in which, for an instant, perception was lifted to a mystical sense of time present all at once: a wholeness of thing…