I think that today’s offering by the American poet Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) is a real sustained tour de force in the way it makes palpable the passage of time by imagining the shadow of night as it crosses the world from east to west. The title is inspired, of course, by the lines in Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’: ‘For ever at my back I hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’.

The poem can also be construed as a reflection on the way empires rise and fall, enjoying their moment in the sun before disappearing into the dark of history.

Note the way in which the relative lack of punctuation, the short urgent lines and the constant repetition of ‘And’ all go to create the sense of an unstoppable momentum.

As well as being a poet, MacLeish was an important librarian. Of coure, all librarians are important, but MacLeish was the ninth Librarian of Congress, a post to which he was personally appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Ecbatan (now Ecbatana) an ancient city in what is now Iran.

Kermanshah: another Iranian city.

Palmyra: now we are in Syria.

You, Andrew Marvell

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on …

Archibald MacLeish