If I Could Tell You

Time appears in a personified form as “Time,” meaning that the speaker refers to it as though it were a living thing and not just an abstract concept. In the poem, the speaker gives two different attributes to Time. The first is that Time will not reveal anything to humans about the deeper meaning behind their experiences, regardless of whether a deeper meaning exists. Instead, “Time will say nothing but I told you so” (Line 1), with the phrase “I told you so” suggesting that Time is indifferent and impassive in the face of human suffering. Furthermore, the fact that “Time will say nothing but I told you so” is one of the poem’s key refrains, appearing multiple times (Lines 1, 6, 12, 18), reinforces the sense of the inescapability of Time itself. The second attribute the speaker gives to Time is ignorance: The speaker suggests that Time itself might not know anything in particular about what the purpose of experience is, because the speaker claims that “Time only knows the price we have to pay” (Line 2). The notion of a “price” that humans “have to pay” for each experience suggests that everything has a cost in the end, even experiences that were ostensibly positive.