It is with these words that the poet, even as he laments the onrushing intrusion of the age, announces his surrender to the most powerful of its tropes: that which envisages time as an irresistible, irreversible forward movement. This jealous deity, the Time-god of modernity, has the power to decide who will be cast into the shadows of backwardness—the dark tunnel of time “outworn”—and who will be granted the benediction of being ahead of the rest, always en avant.
