Time & Perspective Quote by Henry Austin Dobson

A small line with a cruelly efficient twist: time, the thing we accuse of fleeing, is the one element in the room that never budges. Dobson’s "Alas, time stays, we go" works because it flips the everyday metaphor of time as a runner and makes us the ones in motion, sliding off the calendar like scenery out a train window. The "Alas" isn’t decorative Victorian sighing; it’s the admission that the complaint is useless. Time isn’t the problem to be chased or managed. The problem is our exit.

Dobson, a late-Victorian poet associated with the “light verse” tradition, often used elegance and brevity to smuggle in harder truths. Here the technique is almost epigrammatic: two clauses, mirrored structure, a comma like a guillotine. "Stays" is bluntly domestic, even smug; time is the furniture. "We go" is the whole human condition reduced to a curt verb of departure. No heroic struggle, no cosmic drama, just the fact of being moved along.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of modern anxieties that already existed in Dobson’s era: nostalgia as a kind of self-deception, productivity as a hedge against mortality, memory as an attempt to pin what can’t be pinned. If time “stays,” then the past isn’t a place we can revisit so much as a room we’ve already left. The line lands because it denies us the comforting fiction that life is about catching up. It’s about letting go, whether we consent or not.