THE THEME OF TIME
The experience of time is a major theme in the poem. Remember that this is the epoch of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, and their theories about the nature of the universe. Time measurement has everything to do with calculating the earth's revolution around the sun (or, as traditional cosmology had it, the other way round: the sun around the earth). On 4 October 1582, Pope Gregory XIII had the calendar put forward ten days to 15 October, an adjustment not recognized for a long time in Protestant countries. In Hooft's day, Europe was using two different calendars, one ten days ahead of the other!
Go to the >Bibliography for further reading on the calendar.The difference between the steady movement of time as measured by mechanical devices such as clocks, and the subjective experience of time as fast or slow depending on the individual's emotional state, is a favourite theme in Renaissance and especially Baroque poetry. You could compare it with themes such as the difference between dreaming and waking (when you 're dreaming everything seems real, so how can you be sure you're not dreaming as you read this?). In 17th-century Dutch poetry, Hooft and Huygens in particular revel in these paradoxes.
To see a visual representation of Time click >here.
>Back to structure of poem (1)
>Back to structure of poem (2)
