The Levels of Time

In Jacobsen's poem “Fiddler Crab,” time is a principal theme. Time plays a tricky role in the lives of most humans. Frequently, time seems to pass at differing rates. Sometimes it flies by, and at other moments it creeps. When a person looks back on events from the past, some of them seem as if they happened only yesterday, while others seem as if they happened to a different person, in a different life. Oddly, these feelings may not be hinged to events chronologically. In fact, more often than not, the variable feeling of the passage of time is intricately tied to the suffering of the individual. For example, in Jacobsen's own life, she recalled a wonderful day spent with her husband some twenty years in the past, which seemed to have just taken place. But when she recollected her grandson's death—a painful event...