Percy Bysshe Shelley

Lines: 'That time is dead for ever

Heraclitus's river

The stream with 'unreturning waves' echoes Heraclitus: you can't step in the same river twice. Time flows one direction only.

I
That time is dead for ever, child!
Drowned, frozen, dead for ever!
We look on the past
And stare aghast

Aghast/ghast wordplay

Shelley rhymes 'aghast' (horrified) with 'ghast' (archaic for 'ghost-like'). The spectres are both terrifying and ghostly—dead hopes made visible.

At the spectres wailing, pale and ghast,5
Of hopes which thou and I beguiled
To death on life's dark river.
II
The stream we gazed on then rolled by;

Heraclitus's river

The stream with 'unreturning waves' echoes Heraclitus: you can't step in the same river twice. Time flows one direction only.

Its waves are unreturning;
But we yet stand10
In a lone land,
Like tombs to mark the memory

We become monuments

The survivors don't just remember—they ARE tombs. Living people turned into memorial markers for dead possibilities.

Of hopes and fears, which fade and flee
In the light of life's dim morning.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Geography of Lost Time

Shelley maps grief onto landscape. The 'lone land' where the speakers stand isn't a real place—it's the psychological territory of people who've survived something. They're stranded on a shore watching a river (time, the past) flow away from them. The 'dark river' of line 7 becomes the philosophical stream of stanza II, shifting from Gothic imagery to Heraclitean meditation.

The 'spectres wailing, pale and ghast' are personified hopes—not ghosts of dead people but ghosts of dead futures. What makes them spectres is that they were 'beguiled to death,' meaning the speakers themselves killed these hopes through deception or false promises. The word 'beguiled' does double work: hopes were both charmed (seduced into existence) and tricked (deceived into dying).

'Life's dim morning' in the final line inverts the usual metaphor. Morning should be bright, but this one is dim—either because the speakers are so early in life that light hasn't fully arrived, or because their life-dawn is permanently darkened by what they've lost. The phrase suggests youth, but youth without illumination.

The Repeated Stanza Problem

The first stanza appears twice in surviving manuscripts, which has led editors to different solutions. Some print it once, some twice (as here), some mark it as a refrain. The repetition creates a ritual effect—like a mourning chant or a spell to make the past stay dead.

If you read it as refrain, the poem becomes circular: you end where you began, trapped in the same declaration that 'time is dead.' The middle stanza (the river meditation) becomes a failed attempt to philosophize your way out of grief, before the refrain drags you back to raw insistence: 'Drowned, frozen, dead for ever!' The triple emphasis (drowned, frozen, dead) and the repeated 'for ever' suggest someone trying to convince themselves, not stating a fact they've accepted.