Seventeen words, two couplets, and a small parable fits inside them. A clock lies asleep in a forest, bald as a pear, while somewhere else a town is said to have no sense of direction. The poem never joins the two scenes, but the title, "Lost time," does it for us. Time is lost here in two senses: misplaced like an umbrella, and wasted. The central idea seems to be that a community leans on its timekeeper for its sense of purpose, and when the timekeeper wanders off, the community drifts. The poem also hints that the drifting may not be the town's fault.
The first couplet is all image, and a strange one. Calling the clock "sleeping" turns a machine into an animal, curled up among the trees, and it makes the stoppage feel restful rather than tragic. Without punctuation we can also read the line a second way, as if the forest were simply where clock-time goes to sleep. Then comes the simile "bald as a pear." It is funny and unexpected, and it works on several levels. A pear is smooth, round and skinless-looking, so the comparison suggests a clock face with nothing on it. Baldness, in a clock, could mean missing hands, which would be a kind of hairlessness. A pear is also fruit, something that falls from a tree and is left on the ground, and that adds the idea of a clock dropped and forgotten in the undergrowth. The poem gives no explanation, and the image is stronger for it.
The second couplet changes register completely. Out go the soft, sensory words of the woods and in come "absence," "direction" and "imputed," abstract and faintly official. "Imputed" is the key word. To impute something is to attribute it, usually a fault, and often without proof. The sentence is in the passive voice, so we never learn who is doing the imputing. The town is simply accused of aimlessness, as though the accusation had been made in some office out of sight. The joke is that the real cause is sleeping peacefully in the forest, and the town takes the blame.
The two couplets also explain each other. A clock's hands point, and "direction" can mean both a way of pointing and a sense of purpose. A bald clock, one without hands, cannot point anywhere. Read this way, the first couplet is the cause and the second the effect, though the gap between them is left for the reader to bridge. That gap, the white space between the stanzas, does much of the poem's work.
The sound and shape of the poem fit its subject. There is no rhyme, no capital letters, and not a single punctuation mark. Nothing chimes and nothing ticks, which suits a poem about a clock that has stopped. The lines are short and uneven. The first, the longest, ends on the unstressed syllable of "forest," so it trails off like someone dropping into sleep. "Bald as a pear" is clipped and drops suddenly, like the fruit itself. In the second couplet, "an absence of direction" rolls along on its soft Latinate endings, and then "imputed to the town" lands on the firm, heavy word "town." That is the one solid stop in the poem, and it falls on the place that has lost its bearings.
The poem is worth reading because it gets so much out of so little. It sets a natural world of sleep and fruit against a human one of blame and bureaucracy, and it lets the reader decide which is wiser. Is the forest a place where time is lost, or one where it is finally allowed to rest? Is the town truly lost, or only labelled that way by someone who needs a clock to tell it what to do? The poem takes no side. For a student, it shows how a poem can work by juxtaposition rather than statement: put two unlike things side by side, choose a few exact words, and let the mind do the joining. It rewards a second and third reading, as the clock's baldness starts to look like a quiet joke about all the ways we hand our direction over to machines.