Theories of Time and Space

Published in Trethewey’s 2007 collection Native Guard, “Theories of Time and Space” appeals to a natural inner sense for the continuities and changes of time. Written in free verse, “Theories of Time and Space” is a postmodern poem that delves into philosophical themes without extensive reliance upon formal or metrical elements. Like many of Trethewey’s poems, “Theories of Time and Space” deals with the question of memory—personal, historical, and geographical—finding that “[e]verywhere you go will be somewhere / you’ve never been” (Lines 3-4).

The poem explores the geography of coastal Mississippi by way of landmarks and remembered landscape. Trethewey describes with familiarity “the pier at Gulfport where / riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches / in a sky threatening rain” (Lines 9-11), while also describing a time, even before that, before “the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand / dumped on the mangrove swamp—buried / terrain of the past” (Lines 12-14). The question of change over time, what is at once recognizable, and what was, at one point in time, new and unfamiliar, are the core thematic concerns of Trethewey’s poem.

Trethewey also considers, through an exploration of place, the personal question of identity and the changes of time. The poem, from the very beginning, asserts that you can travel through the present, through the unfamiliar, and “[y]ou can get there from here” (Line 1), but when one considers a place or a person as dependent upon a specific time and place, “there’s no going home” (Line 2).

Poet Biography

Born on April 26, 1966 in Gulfport, Mississippi, Natasha Trethewey’s “inheritance” informs much of her life and work: She was born on Confederate Memorial Day to a couple with a diverse racial background. Her parents, Gwendolyn Turnbough and Eric Trethewey, married out-of-state to avoid Mississippi’s racist and discriminatory anti-miscegenation laws. Gwendolyn was a social worker, and Eric, Canadian by birth, taught English at Hollins University in Virginia. The two divorced when Trethewey was very young. When Trethewey was 19 years old, Gwendolyn was murdered by her second husband.

The circumstances of Trethewey’s early life—including her home state’s laws against her parents’ marriage, and her mother’s murder—heavily influence Trethewey’s writing. She writes about memory, life, and death, as well as the historical and racial legacy of the United States, the South, and Mississippi specifically. Her poems investigate these themes in an attempt to understand the nature of loss and grief, personally and in a larger racial and socio-political sense.

Trethewey attained her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, before going on to complete M.A.s in English and Creative Writing at Hollins University. She completed her M.F.A in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1995. Her poetry collection Native Guard won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and in 2012 Trethewey was named the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States. From 2012 to 2016, she also served as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

Poem Text

Trethewey, Natasha. “Theories of Time and Space.” 2006. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

In 10 couplets of 20 lines, “Theories of Time and Space” recounts the speaker’s travel home to the coastal city of Gulfport, Mississippi. The poem opens with a seemingly straightforward statement about traveling back home: “You can get there from here, though / there’s no going home” (Lines 1-2). Home, the speaker insinuates, is not just a place that can be accessed by following a familiar road; home exists in a particular time and area of space, so that it is never the same home that is found more than once. The second couplet continues the same line of thought, extending the explanation of time and space, stating, “Everywhere you go will be somewhere / you’ve never been” (Lines 3-4).

In the third and fourth couplets, the speaker provides explicit instructions to Gulfport, Mississippi, the speaker’s home:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-

by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this

to its natural conclusion—dead end (Lines 5-8).

The fifth and sixth couplets take readers to the destination itself, and the speaker describes the shrimp boats in the water at Gulfport, stormy skies, and a “man-made beach, 26 miles of sand” (Line 12).

The seventh couplet returns to the poem’s more philosophical undertones by considering how the beach at Gulfport itself has changed over time. The speaker claims the beach was originally a “mangrove swamp—buried / terrain of the past” (Lines 13-14), which has been covered in sand to make the current beach recognized by the speaker.

In the eighth and ninth couplet, the speaker addresses the reader with the second-person “you” once more, after drifting away from the “you” addressed at the beginning of the poem (in the first three couplets.) The “you” is instructed to “carry” the “tome of memory” (Line 15.) The tome of memory implies the weight of a remembered past that can never be quite recaptured by the realities of the present or the promises of the future. The speaker tells the reader, the general “you,” that “someone will take your picture” (Line 18), which also references the idea of time by way of still photography, which allows for the photographic capture of a person, object, or event as it exists in a particular place and time.

In the 10th and final couplet, the speaker ultimately concludes that “the photograph—who you were— / will be waiting when you return” (Lines 19-20), asserting the continued passage of time as something that cannot be fought. Only in the “tome of memory” (Line 15) and photographs can time be halted, and even then, outside of the memory or the photograph—change has already taken place, never to be undone.