Time behaves strangely in "Taken." In the opening lines days pass and seasons change, yet "time stood still," a contradiction the rest of the poem sets out to explain. The only thing given about the writer is a name, so everything worth saying has to come from the words on the page. Fortunately, they offer a lot.
The poem is about the aftermath of a love that has ended. The title stays deliberately open. "Taken" could mean a person taken away, a heart taken, or something more final, and the poem never says who or what did the taking. In the last line the verb is handed to "Darkness." Judging by the text, the cause matters less than the effect. The central idea is that loss distorts time: outwardly everything keeps moving, while inwardly nothing does. Losing a person also means losing the colour and light of everything around them.
The first image sets the tone: "Days passed like a common cold." It is an unglamorous comparison. A cold is ordinary and tedious, something you wait out rather than mourn. The speaker's days aren't dramatic. They are grey and dragging, and that flatness makes the loss feel lived-in rather than theatrical.
The second stanza breaks from this with a long, breathless run of repetition: "When our eyes first met, / When our hands touched / When our voices became one." The sequence climbs a ladder of intimacy, from eyes to hands, voices, lips, bodies and finally lives. Almost no punctuation separates the lines, so they tumble into one another like a memory unspooling. "Became one" appears twice, and the last line twists it: "When our lives use to be one!" The tense shifts from "became" to "use to be," and the poem's only exclamation mark lands there, closer to a cry than a statement. The stanza is also built almost entirely from touch and sound. Sight appears only once, in "eyes first met," which matters because sight is exactly what the later stanzas take away.
That loss arrives through colour. The vocabulary of the final stanzas is visual: leaves "loosing there color," "Every shade" darkening, then "Darkness" consuming "every bit of light left." The spelling slips make the poem read as unrevised and immediate, like something written while the feeling was still raw, and that suits its directness. The grammar tracks the damage too. In the third stanza the verbs are gradual ("began loosing," "began to darken"), but by the fourth they are complete: "has lost," "has taken." What was a process has become a fact.
The line "No more sunshine, / No more rain fall" is easy to read past. Sunshine's absence is expected, but rain is usually the weather of sadness, and losing it too suggests there is no relief at all. It could mean no tears, no storm to break the greyness, only a world gone dim. The phrase "No more" also echoes the earlier "When our," turning the poem's repeating pattern from remembered presence into listed absence. The seasons that "changed" in line two seem to have stopped altogether, which connects back to "time stood still."
The form is free verse with no rhyme, which keeps the poem plain and spoken. Its rhythm comes from parallel structure instead. "Days passed," "Months passed," "Years passed" work like a slow drumbeat, each time-span wider than the last, while the long middle stanza interrupts them with the one stretch of warmth. The shape is a bright memory wrapped in grey, and even the memory is already in the past tense.
Its significance lies in how much it gets from simple means. It uses ordinary words, repeated patterns and one well-placed exclamation mark to capture a feeling many readers will know: time that crawls and freezes at once, and a world that seems to lose its colour when someone leaves it. The poem offers no consolation or turn toward recovery. It ends in darkness, and the reader is left standing where the speaker stands.