Few poems announce themselves as bluntly as this one: "It is time." Time for what? Brian Routh never says outright, and that withheld object gives the poem its pull. By the end it has become time to be alone: to stand apart from other people, from the mother, perhaps from God, and to accept that this is the condition of being alive rather than a choice.
The first stanza works by closing things down. The speaker will "isolate the rooms" and "close up the gaps", practical verbs, like someone shuttering a house before a storm. Yet he starts "amongst the bushes", outdoors, so the rooms may be inner ones, compartments of the self. "Out from the lapse" is deliberately slippery. It could mean a lapse of memory, of faith, or of time, and the poem refuses to choose. "Gaps" and "lapse" do chime softly, though, one of the few moments where sound pulls lines together.
There is no regular rhyme or metre. This is free verse in short, breath-sized lines, and the second stanza makes breath its subject: clouds hang "around the centres / stopping the breath from freely passing." The central claim follows plainly: "to be alone as we all must be / in birth and death." The next two lines strip away comfort one gesture at a time: "no holding of hands / or clinging to mother."
Mother returns in the third stanza, transformed into a tree. Branches bend, and their "children leaves richly green" drink "mother's milk" before "detaching themselves and falling to the ground." This passage is the poem's argument in miniature. Separation is as natural as a leaf's fall, and the leaf falls while still "richly green", at the height of its life, not after decay. Even the speaker's walking is spatial: "within the spaces of walking" echoes the earlier "rooms" and "gaps," so solitude is a place he enters, not just a mood.
The fourth stanza is the most musical and the most painful. It has no punctuation, and its lines shrink: "in air / on ground / to breathe a sound / alone in darkness / hollow sound / echoing back to sender." The repeated "ground" and "sound" give the nearest thing to rhyme in the poem, and the repetition of "sound" mimics an echo. "Echoing back to sender" borrows the language of the post office, a letter returned unopened. A cry goes out and nothing answers. Since the next stanza turns to religion, it is reasonable to hear unanswered prayer here, though the text only implies it.
That last stanza begins by looking back: "remember the passion / of the garden dreams." The garden may recall Eden, though the poem never says so. What follows is a heap of inherited ritual, "ceremonious garments," "the making of vows," "God, esteem and glory," piled up without verbs, as if these things were costumes rather than convictions. Then the lines break away: "out from it / away / free / has to be." The phrase "out from" repeats the first stanza's "out from the lapse," so the poem ends by circling back to where it began. "Free / has to be" can be read as a demand or as a resignation, and that double meaning is the poem's final tension. Then comes the bleak close: "all will wither / no more sound." Sound began as breath and became a hollow echo; now it stops. The leaves, once green, are withered.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses consolation without becoming merely gloomy. Freedom and loss arrive together, and the speaker never pretends they can be separated. Its images are simple: rooms, trees, milk, an echo. With them it takes on very large questions about birth, faith and death. Its plainest moment, "agonising moments of heart's despair," is its blunt spot, since it names the feeling that the images elsewhere imply far more powerfully. But the lowercase line openings and loose punctuation make the whole thing feel like thinking aloud, and that gives its final silence an unsettling honesty.