How does lyric think is one way of asking the question, since poetry in discipline seems to demand a defence. Another way of putting it is what time is let in and out of a poem? Might we end up at the end of a poem in a different season, or a different knowledge of seasons, and what might we then say about what a poem can do? In ‘The Ridiculous Translator’s Hopes’ John Ashbery reminds us that certain ends are stalled beginnings. As we reach the close of the poem we linger on a precipice: ‘as a bride left waiting at the church, inching backwards / to the cliff’s edge as the photographer gets ready to smile’. We are caught in the flicker of a hesitation; an ending that refuses closure prevents an eventuality that seems inevitable, but which might not yet occur – were the poem to end just here where it does, in defiance of gravitational law. Ashbery alerts us, as Geoffrey Hartman writes on Romantic line endings, to ‘a trembling of the imagined on the brink of the real’. The artifice of lyric, then, which is alert to its own temporal boundary, clarifies, as Carolyn Steedman writes of Ashbery’s poem, ‘the occluded and discarded endings that never came into existence’; the various historical possibilities of the self in relation – in Ashbery’s words – to the ‘whitewashed domain of the present past tense’.

Lyric time returns us to the puzzle of the place from which we speak: to the duplicity of the self that emerges when we are attentive to the work of thinking, and the consequent difficulty of having any historic hold on interiority – on what we feel – as a clean site of knowledge. We hear something of this doubleness – the duplicity of the self on lyric time – in the first stanza of John Clare’s ‘A Clock a Clay’, which pushes the I next to the repetition of the verb ‘lie’ (which unveils something beneath it), as an ‘I’ that is both a ladybird and the poet-speaker:

In the cowslip pips I lie,
Hidden from the buzzing fly,
While green grass beneath me lies,
Pearled with dew like fishes’ eyes,
Here I lie, a clock a clay,
Waiting for the time of day.

Clare’s perfectly symmetrical tetrameters end in the lines: ‘Here still I live lone clock a clay / Watching for the time of day’ in a lonely historical present tense that in its dependable rhyme makes us almost believe that the speaker transcends the historical confines of their material dwelling (the state of loneness, then, as a kind of historical indwelling in lyric time). Elsewhere Clare allows us to hear how seasons are slippery things – January contains the rhyme of May – as I contains the lie of its own distinctiveness.

The end of the poem finds its beginning in another poem. In R.F. Langley’s ‘Blues for Titania’, lyric is a net for the time we cannot see: time running ahead of itself. ‘The beetle runs into the future’, Langley opens his poem (echoing Clare, at least to my ear, the ladybird a kind of beetle), and the line keeps on running. The ‘now’ of the poem is where the present runs away with itself, where things are becoming, sounding, what they have only seemed. Our inner ear presses against the poem’s inner ear (the half-rhyme at mid-line ‘Swallow tomorrow. Borrow and bet’ trains us to hear our own inner echoes – the feeling that snags at our internalised discipline – that floating super ego – and reminds of what it is we want from knowledge). The beetle stands in for the I of the poet or the I of the speaker so that we are constantly beside ourselves reading lyric. The poem’s work of memory takes place in the past’s present tense, reminding us of the echoes we cannot stop wanting. But the poem also teaches us how to want the echo of something new. ‘His memory ripples emeralds’: something new happens in the space of the analogy we had been expecting.

Is it possible for time to happen in a poem that doesn’t happen elsewhere? For Sharon Cameron lyric time ‘is overwhelmed by the promise of another, more satisfactory, order that will destroy time altogether’. Of Emily Dickinson’s ‘I saw no way–the Heavens were stitched’, she writes, of how the poem starts from ‘the dead-end of the poem’s beginning, which closes the speaker off from heaven and then more dramatically turns the world inside out so that, almost expelled from it, she is left standing upon a mere rim, the ‘Circumference’ of historical time. The present tense of lyric, for Cameron, thinks beyond itself to ‘the dream that revenges itself on an inadequate reality’. For George Wright, writing on Swinburne’s ‘A Vision of Spring in Winter’:

the poet here may look back, but the verbs press forward. The action described in a lyric poem is tentative, provisional. We do not usually call it fictional, but we still feel it to be the product of design, of conscious contrivance. The lyrical mode, like that of drama or fiction, is hypothetical and experimental…it is also nonhistorical…This is why we use the present tense to describe events in literary works: they go on again and again.

‘You want to know what all this waiting / is for, late April, the sun burns the balcony / squished carnations, the things to which we reason under foot’, I write in a poem. As I’m reaching the end I think of Lyn Hejinian’s essay on rejecting lyric closure, which questions the easiness of tenses we slip into, when the equation is you and I: ‘the cold-flush claim of you’ is now ‘dissembling the world that was I’. And an echo I wonder writing this surely from Langley: ‘my anguish tempered like emerald fever to a crab’. Later on, I try to find space in the poem for a moment when all the seasons slide into one: I am walking down the street in Garbatella, it is the beginning of May (‘Come queen of months in company’, Clare says) and I run for cover from what we imagine are vengeful boys flinging stones, only to realise that the stones are hailstones and the spring heat has catapulted everything into a wintry storm that subsides as quickly as it arrives, but feels like the start of something we have been feeling for some time.