Sir Walter Ralegh, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” 5–8

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I’d like to imagine that the fact I fought was the reason the attack ended, but the truth is he let me go. If he’d wanted more, there was no question more would have happened. I would have stopped fighting and become what some might call an accomplice to the act. I was, in fact, already going limp, subtly acceding to his desires in the hopes that, having satisfied them, he would stop. Perhaps this is why he pushed himself away. Perhaps it was enough that he’d grabbed and inserted and taken what he could within narrow legal, or personal, limits to prove a point to me and to himself: anything he wanted he could have. In the end, I was not so much a body to be reckoned with but a structure he would humiliate and dismantle.

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In life, time’s passage allows us to see ourselves change, but a poem’s chronology forces us to see repetition: lyric time is not progressive but fragmentary and recursive. Traumatic time works like lyric time: the now of terror repeatedly breaking back through the crust of one’s consciousness. Mourning the wound becomes an obsessive love of the lost. Mourning is merely the process by which we remain frozen: the birds always in flight, the hoopoe continually in pursuit. O, could our mourning ease thy misery!

Titus Andronicus, II, iv

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One fantasy, in and outside of poetry, is that time itself stops. But Ralegh’s point is that time never stops. Instead, its continual unfolding disorders memory, it blunts and numbs. Time is the subject that finally silences Philomela.

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Compassion and retributive justice require that we hold multiple senses of time alive in mind: the past event, a punishment’s present, the future in which this crime cannot or will no longer be enacted. Compassion calls for complex responses where vengeance calls for only one: a raving.

I don’t have compassion for my attacker, just as I don’t have a word for that day, only a description of its unfolding. Behind these descriptions, you may imagine the word or punishment you think appropriate. This act is done for yourself. It is not, though you may believe it is, at all useful to me.

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Lucky, I think after he leaves, my shirt torn, nose running. Nothing stirs in the woods. Still I sit on the forest floor, unsure where to run. Will he come back? Will he be on the trail, will I see him in town? At the thought of town, at the thought of being seen by him or any other human, I shake and burn with shame.

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