The Song of Wandering Aengus Time Quotes

The descriptions of moths "on the wing" (aka flying) and stars "flickering out" give us a sense of the day passing as the speaker prepares to fish in the stream. Changes in nature, in other words, are one way that the speaker conveys the passage of time here.

Hang on a sec—what just happened here? One minute the speaker's fishing in a stream, the next he's old. Between the end of the second stanza and the beginning of the third, a huge amount of time has passed. The speaker's grown old. And he's spent all this time looking for the "glimmering girl." While the speaker first dwells on the moment when he met the girl, here he skips over a big chunk of his life. This contrast suggests how the moment of meeting the girl transforms the speaker's whole life. All of his time is spent in pursuit of her.

Here the speaker imagines finding the "glimmering girl" and spending all his time with her. He imagines that they'll "pluck" "the silver apples of the moon,/ The golden apples of the sun" until "time and times are done." This is the one moment in the poem when "time" is mentioned in an explicit way. It's ironic, though. The speaker's growing old, and death isn't far off. So he actually doesn't have that much "time" left to find the glimmering girl. The image of the apples of the moon and sun also calls attention to the passage of time. The moon and the sun represent night and day. Nights and days are passing, and yet the girl is nowhere to be found.