One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of

Hear these words, children of the flame of language, for Robert Morgan has spoken thus: “One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.” This is no small saying, but a key to the ancient gates of imagination. For in the realm of poetry, time bends like a reed in the wind, and the poet’s tongue has the power to stretch the heartbeat of a minute into the echo of eternity, or to compress the span of a lifetime into a single sigh.

The distortions Morgan speaks of are not falsehoods but revelations. They are the bending of the ordinary so that the extraordinary may be glimpsed. A clock may tick sixty times to make a minute, yet a poet may hold within that minute a war, a kiss, or the ending of worlds. Likewise, the slow drift of a century can be gathered into one line, a line that pierces through the ages and carries its truth like a spear into the heart of the reader. This is the heroic gift of poetry—to free us from the narrow cage of linear time and reveal the hidden vastness within every moment.

Recall, then, the voice of Shakespeare, who in his sonnets spoke of time’s cruelty and love’s defiance. With a few lines, he made a lifetime of devotion endure beyond the decay of flesh. “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” Here is distortion divine: the fleeting glance of a beloved is magnified until it outlasts stone and empire. In this bending of time, poetry becomes not illusion but immortality.

Consider too the words of those who suffered the trenches of World War I. In the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, a single minute under fire was stretched into an eternity of terror, while the entire wasted youth of a generation was compressed into a few aching stanzas. In their distortions, they revealed the true weight of human suffering—that a moment could last forever in memory, and that decades of innocence could vanish in a single burst of violence. Without such poetic bending, history would be numbers alone; with it, it becomes a wound that still bleeds across time.

Thus the poet is like the blacksmith of reality, striking upon the anvil of language to warp and shape the steel of experience. Where others see a stream flowing steadily, the poet may see it racing through centuries, carrying empires on its back. Where others note the fading of a sunset in a few minutes, the poet may make that sunset stand as the metaphor of an entire lifetime. These distortions are not lies but visions—gifts that allow us to see beyond the veil of the ordinary.

The lesson, dear seeker, is this: do not be bound by the straight path of the clock. Time as measured by numbers is not the same as time as felt by the soul. Learn to look at each minute as if it could hold the power of a thousand years, and see in a thousand years the fragile beauty of a single breath. Let your words, your thoughts, your deeds carry both the weight of eternity and the lightness of the moment. For in this bending of perception lies wisdom, strength, and freedom.

In practice, train yourself to notice the elasticity of time in your own life. When you are in joy, pause, and see how a minute expands to fill your heart. When in sorrow, note how days can collapse into a blur, leaving only fragments that endure. Write of these truths. Speak them. Use metaphor to enlarge the small, to shrink the vast, until you see clearly how both are woven together. By doing this, you will walk not as a prisoner of the ticking clock, but as a master of time’s music, a participant in the great poem of existence.

Thus, remember: the power of poetry lies in its distortions—its power to make the fleeting eternal, and the eternal intimate. Embrace this vision, and your life will no longer be measured in hours or years, but in the depth of meaning you carve from them. Would you like me to shape this into a spoken-oral style script, with rising crescendos and meditative pauses, so it may sound like a teaching recited to disciples beneath the night sky?