Ivor Gurney’s “Time and the Soldier” speaks in the voice of a man who has had enough of waiting. Gurney was an English poet and composer who served as a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment during the First World War, and many of his poems from this period fold the landscapes of his home county into the strain of soldiering. Published in his 1917 collection *Severn & Somme*, this short poem turns a familiar wartime feeling—time dragging unbearably—into a small, defiant drama. The speaker does not face a shell or a trench raid; he faces Time itself, and refuses to bow to it.
The poem’s energy comes from direct address. “How slow you move, old Time; / Walk a bit faster!” begins like a frustrated shout at a dawdling companion. Time is immediately personified as an irritating old fool, and later as a “decrepit Fool” with capital-F authority. Yet the speaker reverses the expected power relationship: “Old fool, I’m not your slave.... / Beauty’s my master!” The words *slave* and *master* sharpen the conflict. Time may hold him “for a space,” but his deeper loyalty belongs elsewhere. That capitalised Beauty is not merely a pretty abstraction; it stands for the landscapes, music, and remembered places that keep a soldier mentally alive.
Gurney’s form reinforces this mixture of mockery and impatience. The short lines, restless rhyme pairs such as *faster/master* and *Time/rhyme*, and bursts of exclamation give the poem the feel of a taunt or a child’s rhyme. The speaker even dismisses Time as “a ghost, a thing of thought, / An easy rhyme.” That phrase is playfully self-aware: the poem is rhyming, and calling Time an “easy rhyme” is a way of cutting it down to size. But the tumbling rhythm also mimics the jumpy mind of someone trapped in waiting, where minutes refuse to pass. The ellipses after “slave....,” “space....,” and “go....” create little pauses of suspension, as though the speaker is caught between present endurance and future release.
The emotional heart of the poem arrives when the speaker looks forward. “Some day I shall again, / For all your scheming, / See Severn valley clouds / Like banners streaming.” The Severn valley is Gurney’s Gloucestershire, and the simile turns clouds into something ceremonious and proud. They are not just weather; they are banners, signals of beauty and belonging. The following line is even more local: “And walk in Cranham lanes, / By Maisemore go....” Cranham and Maisemore are real places, small words that anchor the poem in an actual landscape rather than a vague dream of home. This specificity is one of Gurney’s great strengths. The soldier’s hope is not abstract; it is a walk down a particular lane, a view of a particular valley, a return to the places that made him.
The lasting power of “Time and the Soldier” lies in its honest depiction of war as a psychological struggle with waiting and time. The enemy is not only across the wire; it is the slow crawl of days that separate the soldier from home. The poem’s final explosion, “You are SO SLOW!!!,” is comic on the surface but also desperate underneath. Gurney understands that a soldier can endure danger more easily than the feeling of life slipping away in delay. Knowing that Gurney later suffered from severe mental illness and spent years in institutions adds a shadow to the poem’s fierce hope. The return he insists on was not simple or easy. Yet in these lines, beauty remains his master, and time is just an old fool he refuses to obey.