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Duration | Introduction

Octavio Paz’s poem “Duration” was originally published in his 1962 collection Salamandra (1958– 1961), later published in English as Salamander. It provides an excellent example of one of the twentieth century’s most important poets working at his prime. In this poem, Paz, the 1990 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, shows his interests in writing poetry outside of the poetic tradition, in exploring new methods of using language on the page. The images that he uses here do not follow one another gracefully, but they do add up to a new way of looking at reality. By breaking reality into fragments and then putting them back together in careful arrangements, “Duration” is able to raise questions about the ways that the fragments of experience relate to one another.

Paz was an important world literary figure from the 1950s until his death in 1998 and is considered by many to be the most important and influential writer that Mexico has ever produced. Much of his most notable experimental poetry was produced while he worked for Mexico’s diplomatic corps in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to poetry, he is known almost equally well as a literary theorist, with numerous books of essays about the nature of art and the possibilities of language.

Today, “Duration” can be found in both English and Spanish in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957–1987, published by New Directions.

Duration Summary

I
The epigraph that starts this poem is from the I Ching, an important text of ancient Chinese Confucianism. The I Ching, also referred to as “The Book of Changes,” expresses the Taoist philosophy of yin and yang, the balance of opposites in all things. This is shown in the first two lines of “Duration,” which juxtapose the darkness of the sky against the lightness of the earth.

In addition to a balance between things, line 3 presents a balance between objects and actions, as the crowing of a rooster, generally recognized as a sign that dawn is coming, is presented as a violent, tearing motion that can affect the night, dividing it into parts.

The poem’s first section contains two lines, 4 and 5, that have parallel wording. In each case, Paz urges readers to rethink the reality of what is discussed. Of course, water and wind do not wake at any one point: they go on with a steady motion day and night. The poem gives them human characteristics, anthropomorphizing them. More specifically, it gives them the characteristics of the speaker of the poem by having the second one ask about a person to whom the poem’s speaker would be talking. The white horse at the end of the stanza is not, significantly, counterbalanced with another parallel image, implying that it is a symbol of freedom that is outside of the yin/yang perspective.

II
The point of this stanza is to draw a comparison between the “you” being addressed in the poem and the elements of nature. It starts with a personification of nature, portraying the forest’s quiet stillness as “sleep” and the leaves that lie on the ground in the forest as a “bed.” After the first line, each subsequent line focuses on the human being surrounded by nature, and with each line the imagery becomes more imaginative. Imagining rain as a bed for a sleeping person is reasonable, because a person could sleep in rain or on top of the puddles it leaves. The “bed of wind” mentioned in the third line is less likely, however, as is the idea of singing in a bed. Mentioning wind draws a connection from this stanza back to the epigraph from the I Ching. The last line’s reference to kissing in a bed of sparks is a sexual reference, implying the... » Complete Duration Summary