Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn” (1980). Content and Description

“Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn” first appeared in the collection Being Here: Poetry 1977-1980 (1980). In the final part of this collection, from which this poem is drawn, the poetic voice describes life in old age, the “autumn” of our lives. The poem is written in free verse, without regular rhyme or metrical patterns, and its lines and stanzas vary in length. The first-person speaker whose voice we hear contemplates the nature of time, the nature of the self, and the changing seasons. For the poem’s speaker, human life cannot be conceived apart from time, rendering us unable to comprehend it in its purest form.

True insight into the nature of time remains just outside our understanding, beyond our grasp. Throughout the poem Warren uses philosophical language concerned with what our lives mean, our existence—the reality philosophers often refer to as being. In “Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn” Warren ruminates on how we understand and experience our own mortality and how we, as the natural world does, change. It is one of the Warren poems that treat the exploration of the self in a time-bound world and explore the paradox of living in a world to which we have no permanent connection.

The natural world, with its changing seasons, may mirror the stages of our lives, but, as with God, we cannot communicate with it; our language, including poetic speech, always falls short. For the speaker of the poem, we live a bound life controlled by time and limited by language. This awareness causes the speaker to react with anger and a bitter hatred for the one who fashioned the universe this way: God.

Warren uses a series of images from nature to explore complex philosophical issues, drawing comparisons between nature and our lives. The speaker lies floating in a “a mountain pool,” looking up at “one lone leaf” (3.19-20). The leafis a symbol, something that signifies an idea or object beyond itself: in this case, the universal journey from birth to death mediated by time. The tree that the leaf hangs from symbolizes life, while the cold black water that the speaker lies on symbolizes death. The leaf dramatizes the passage from birth to death when, in stanzas 7 and 8, it detaches and floats down to the water.

In “Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn” the speaker both savors and laments time’s passing, celebrating the natural beauty brought about by seasonal change and simultaneously regretting mortality, the change time inevitably causes. Warren expresses time’s polar extremes in the poem’s final stanza, which describes life using a metaphor of currency: Life is the “payment” given by the “heart,” a “dime-thin, thumb-worn, two-sided, two-faced coin” (11.1).

For Warren, to live is to deal with change and passing: the movement of time, which is at once active, alive, and also decaying, moving toward death, something expressed by the coin’s two-sidedness in the poem’s last lines.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. According to the poem, how do the seasons reflect our lives?

2. If on one level the poem is about becoming aware of death, what truths does the poem tell us? What significance does the awareness of mortality have?

3. What is it that the water’s “one cold claw” releases in line 28? Why do you think the persona chooses to describe it as “a single drop?” How does this relate to the water symbolism throughout the poem?