Time & Perspective Quote by George Murray

Restlessness is the engine here: Murray isn’t describing a tidy timeline so much as an impulse to physically sway between eras, as if time were something you can rock like a chair. That verb matters. “Rock back and forth” suggests a self-soothing motion, but also a refusal to settle, an artistic method built on oscillation rather than arrival. For a poet, it’s an admission that the present rarely feels sufficient on its own; it has to be bracketed by the deep past (myth) and the far horizon (distant futures) to come into focus.

The pairing of “myth” and “distant futures” is a clever cheat code: myth carries authority without being verifiable, the future carries possibility without being testable. Both operate in the realm where facts loosen and meaning tightens. By adding “yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” Murray collapses the cosmic into the everyday, implying that lyric time is not chronological but layered. Memory and prediction become adjacent rooms.

Then comes the sly self-diagnosis: “a bit like prophecy and a bit like storytelling.” Prophecy claims inevitability; storytelling claims contingency. Poets live in the tension between those roles, wanting the line to feel fated while knowing it’s made. Murray signals that doubleness without mystifying it: the poem can sound like it knows what’s coming, even as it’s built from craft, voice, and arrangement. The subtext is a wager about poetry’s function now: not to report reality, but to forecast meaning by remixing the oldest narratives with the newest anxieties.