Time and Time Again – Class 12 English Chapter 12 Notes & NCERT PDF

About the Poet: A.K. Ramanujan (1929–1993)

A.K. Ramanujan is one of India's finest English-language poets. He is best known for his pioneering translations of ancient Tamil poetry into modern English. At the time of his death he was professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago and was recognised as the world's most profound scholar of South Indian languages and culture. His interests in anthropology and folklore shaped his craftsmanship in English. The book calls this poem the complex distillation of a lifetime of unusual thought and feeling.

Reading the Poem

The poem begins unusually, with "Or" — as if we are overhearing the middle of a conversation or argument, and the speaker is offering another example. At first it seems simply to be about clocks and timekeeping. Only gradually does the reader realise that it is about communal relations in an Indian city.

Lines 1–14 — Clocktowers out of step

Or listen to the clocktowers

of any old well-managed city

beating their gongs round the clock, each slightly

off the others' time, deeper or lighter

in its bronze,

In any old well-managed city, the clocktowers beat their gongs round the clock (a pun: all day, and around the clock-face). Each is slightly off the others' time and deeper or lighter in its bronze — each has its own voice. They beat a different sequence each half-hour.

Why the differences? The poet lists causes:

The clocks represent communities, each built and maintained by a different group, each keeping its own "time". Their relations swing between perennial (lasting) feuds and seasonal (temporary) alliances. The sounds are sometimes cut off by a change of wind, / a change of mind, or a siren / between the pieces of a backstreet quarrel — a siren of police or ambulance hinting at street violence.

Lines 15–19 — The silenced clock

One day you look up and see one of them

eyeless, silent, a zigzag sky showing

through the knocked-out clockwork, after a riot,

a peace-march time bomb, or a precise act

Of nature in a night of lightnings.

One day a clocktower is eyeless, silent — its face gone, a zigzag sky visible through the knocked-out clockwork. The cause could be a riot, a peace-march time bomb (a bitter irony — violence hidden in a march for peace), or a precise act / Of nature in a night of lightnings. Nature's act is called precise because lightning strikes exactly, destroying the clock cleanly — unlike human violence, which is chaotic and deliberate. The poet places human violence and natural disaster side by side, as things that simply happen.

The Title

"Time and Time Again" means repeatedly. Communal clashes happen again and again; the clocks strike again and again. The title also puns on time — clock time and historical time.

Implicit Comparison

The clocktowers = religious communities of a city: each slightly different, each proud of its own sound, never perfectly synchronised. Differences arise from accident, human error, donors' whims and old rivalries.

Poet's Attitude

The tone is quiet, detached and ironic rather than angry. Among the book's options (critical condemnation, helpless acceptance, wistful lament), the poem best reflects helpless acceptance tinged with irony: riots, bombs and lightning are listed together in the same flat voice, as recurring facts of city life. Many readers argue this mirrors how the average Indian responds to both human violence and nature's fury — with resigned endurance.

Literary Devices & Form

Word Power

Board Exam Focus

Common Mistakes