Reviews are limited by at least two things: The reviewer's knowledge/background and the author's temperament. Sometimes the reviewer's understanding and interpretation of a piece misses the mark. When the author believes this is the case, he can become hurt or angered. Please don't be. This review is neither a condemnation of your work, nor an extolment. It's just my opinion, nothing more.




The first stanza paints a almost fatalistic mood. Time slips past us and there is nothing much that we can do. The second stanza uses metaphor to intensify that feeling of helplessness. Time becomes a physical creation, the very cogs of time digging into life and lifting it away.

The third stanza becomes more cryptic, more enigmatic. Suddenly the subject of beaches and we are introduced to Gaia, the personification and or Goddess of Earth. I'm not sure what the relevance is here, but I suppose it is more for effect than meaning.

Stanza four gets back the the theme of time and man's inability to control it. Again, the symbolism is strong, We see time as its personified being, the old man with the withered hands.

The last stanza begins effectively. We see the old gears of the clock, of time, grinding and coming to a halt. You have a misspelling there I believe, you typed, "hault,"in line seventeen. The last lines add imagery to the scene and the over-all impression is one of time's inexorable and unrelenting escape. All we can do is struggle through, waiting until that day when the gears clog and our time comes to its end. It's a depressing though, though accurate enough. However, the older you get, the more realistic death becomes, and the less pleasing does the notion of those gears rusting seem to us. We spend more time cloaking our truths, hiding them from the obvious thoughts that we all have, but try to hide.

It is a good poem, maybe more interested in the demise than on how to live with it, and maybe that is also the difference between youth and age. The young address the end in fatalistic terms, and the old try to find meaning within life, though we know it's meaningless, so it is up to us to create meaning.

Either way, it is a good poem.