“What Is Time?”

Browsing through the Dostoevskii brothers’ journal Time, you can see there was a bit of a vogue for American poetry on the eve of the U.S. Civil War. In 1861 their very first issue had (along with “A Fallen but Charming Creature” and the beginning of The Insulted and the Injured) V. Kostomarov’s translation of Longfellow’s “The Slave’s Dream” (1842), given the title “The Negro’s Dream” (Сон негра) in the table of contents, but “The Negro Slave’s Dream” (Сон негра-невольника) in the text. Volume two had a poem by Lev Mei with the intriguing title “Time (A Thought by a North American Poet of Unknown Name)” (Время [Мысль неизвестного по имени северо-американского поэта]). I was curious what this was and whether it was a real poet, and all my questions were answered by this fantastic 2007 post by Vitaliy Simankov.

As you’ll see there if you read Russian, Mei’s poem is a free translation of “What Is Time?” (c. 1823?) by the real but obscure Joshua Marsden (1777–1837). He was born in England but earned the “North American” by traveling the Atlantic coast from New Brunswick to Bermuda preaching Methodism. As Simankov says in a 2012 comment, it would be interesting to know “where Mei got the original from, and with it his information about the poem’s North American provenance.”

Mei changes quite a bit—for one thing, when the title is “Time” instead of “What Is Time?” it takes longer to figure out what question the poet is asking a series of living and dead people and things. In Marsden’s original poem, the ten stanzas have the poet putting the same question to “an aged man,” “the ancient, venerable dead,” “a dying sinner,” ”the golden Sun and silver spheres,” “the Seasons,” “a spirit lost,” “my dial,” “my Bible,” “old father Time himself,” and “the mighty Angel.” People are a minority of those surveyed, living people doubly so.

Mei has nine stanzas, the first three of which are about several categories of “the living.” When the poet asks the question of “the dead” in stanza 4, I thought we were going to get a series of equal weight, but the asymmetry is almost funny: it quickly turns out that the dead are silent, and he switches to asking inanimate, celestial, and supernatural things in stanzas 5–9.

This is an English question rather than a Russian one, but what kind of dial is Marsden talking about in stanza 7?

Of things inanimate, my dial I
Consulted, and it made me this reply;
“Time is the season fair of living well,
The path of glory, or the path of hell.”

Is it just a watch, and “of” means “out of the inanimate things I might have asked”? I can see why a timepiece might be what you’d ask about time, but I don’t see why this would be its answer. At first I took “of” differently (“I consulted my dial about inanimate things”) and couldn’t make much sense of “dial” then. The OED has 1830s/1840s examples of “dial” in figurative senses that would have stumped me (“We men may serve as flower-dials for beings of a higher order” and “the shepherd’s calendar, and the one o’clock, the very dial of poetry”).

It’s been a Mei-intensive week for me, as I’ve also been listening to The Maid of Pskov (Псковитянка, 1873, but better known in its third version, 1894), the Rimsky-Korsakov opera based on his 1849–59 play.