Billy Collins's "No Time" is a poem that describes the speaker hurrying on a weekday morning to get to an unspecified location. While driving, he or she passes the cemetery in which the speaker's parents are buried. Rather than pause or stop, the speaker continues on while imagining that the father disapproves and sits up while the mother tells the father to lie back down in his grave.

Ultimately, this eight-line poem points to the theme of precious time in life passing too quickly as people waste it uselessly. The setting of a cemetery speaks to the idea of life itself being transient. Yet, rather than directly dealing with the truth of the ephemeral nature of life, the speaker chooses to ignore a precious moment with his or her parents in favor of another errand in the first stanza. Primarily, Collins utilizes diction in a way that captures the theme clearly. The words "rush," "tap the horn," and "speed past" communicate a sense of hurry in the speaker's life. However, that hurry becomes a waste because the speaker then reveals in line five that he or she spends the rest of the day thinking about his or her parents. The speaker states, "Then, all day, I think of him rising up." So, Collins effectively creates a sense of regret on the part of the speaker and calls readers to examine how they use their own time.

Discuss Billy Collin's theme(s) in "No Time" and how the writer gets those themes across.

The title of the poem, "No Time," provide a significant clue as to the theme of the poem. The speaker says that he is "In a rush" on a weekday morning. Such a feeling is familiar to most of us: rushing to get to work or school, we don't want to be late, and sometimes we feel that we have no time to spare.

However, in a completely different and more significant way, the speaker's deceased parents have no time; they have no time left to live at all because they are dead and gone. The speaker's perception of his own lack of time seems to pale in comparison to his parents's literal lack of time. He says that, for the rest of the day, he imagines his father "rising up" from his grave "to give [him] that look / of knowing disapproval." It would seem, then, that the speaker's father wants him to slow down. It's a good reminder for the speaker that life is short and we run out of time before we know it.

Whatever we seem to rush around for in life—work, school, appointments, and so on—suddenly seems a great deal less important when we compare it to the fact that we will, in a very real sense, one day run out of time. The juxtaposition of the speaker's hyperbolic sense that he has no time with his parents's literal lack of time achieves this message.