One of Eliot’s quatrain poems, this one is effectively in two halves: the first half discusses the Jacobean playwright John Webster and his contemporary, the poet John Donne, and how both understood the mortality that lies just under the living do. In this poem about eternity, the precocious French poet of the nineteenth century likens eternity to the sea that had ‘fled away’ with the sun. It’s as if Dickinson is answering Stoppard’s question from the top of this blog post, before he’d even asked it, with the response: ‘eternity will never end because it never starts – it’s a continual process made up of the here and now’.Īrthur Rimbaud, ‘ Eternity’.
So begins this poem from Dickinson, which sees eternity as a succession of moments, which always form the present.
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