Aging & Wisdom Quote by Ralph Hodgson

Time gets personified here not as a dignified father clock but as a slippery outsider: an "old gypsy man" whose whole identity is motion. Hodgson’s genius is in choosing a figure associated (in the period’s romantic imagination) with itinerancy, charm, and refusal of settled life. The speaker isn’t bargaining with a cosmic principle; he’s trying to sweet-talk a traveler who never unpacks. That shift makes the plea feel intimate and a little desperate, like calling after someone already turning the corner.

"Will you not stay" is formally polite, almost courtly, which only sharpens the humiliation underneath: time does not negotiate. The caravan image intensifies the power imbalance. A caravan suggests a self-contained world that can simply roll on without you, leaving you roadside. The speaker’s request, "just for one day", is tellingly modest - not immortality, not even youth, just a temporary ceasefire. That restraint is the subtextual ache: he knows the ask is unreasonable, so he scales it down into something that still won’t be granted.

Context matters. Hodgson is writing in an early 20th-century lyric tradition that loved musical address and pastoral fantasy, but the line carries modern anxiety: life speeding up, moments thinning out, the sense that experience is always already departing. It’s also haunted by the era’s romanticized, stereotyped image of Romani people - a poetic shortcut to "ungraspable" that reveals as much about the speaker’s cultural lens as his fear of loss. The line works because it stages time as a charismatic fugitive: impossible to hate, impossible to hold.