In The Time Traveler’s Wife, written word and fine art serve as a way for characters to connect through time and even beyond the grave. In the early years of Henry and Clare’s romance, their shared love of poetry—particularly the works of Andrew Marvell and Rainer Maria Rilke—builds the foundation of their relationship. No matter what year or at what age they are as Henry’s time travels bring them together, the poetry they both love remains a familiar touchstone of meaning. It also functions as a source of solace and distraction in anxious moments. For example, Henry recites a poem of Rilke’s to calm Clare while she is in labor during Alba’s birth. He also uses his last breaths to quote the same Marvell line with which he toasted Clare the first time she brought him home: “To world enough and time.”
It is not only the work of famous artists and writers that communicates meaning between characters but also—and perhaps more importantly—the work that characters create themselves. After the death of Clare’s mother, Lucille, Clare finds a poem that Lucille wrote about teenage Clare, and the tenderness with which Lucille wrote about Clare confirms Lucille’s love for her daughter despite years of conflict. As a visual artist herself, Clare’s sketches also function as emblems of her love. She draws Henry one day in the Meadow as a girl, and she draws Alba when Alba is a baby. Clare hopes that the resulting pictures demonstrate her love for her family long after they all die. Henry’s final letter to Clare, which she reads after his death, best sums up the ultimate function that artifacts like these serve in relationships. He concludes his final treatise with the phrase “time is nothing.” Throughout the novel, characters find ways to encapsulate their love and passion, whether it be through visual art, music, or literature. In doing so, they succeed in making time inconsequential, using words and images to capture feeling and hold its form in perpetuity. Through art and written word, nothing—not even time or death—can sever the connection between people who create these mementos and those who understand their encoded meanings.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Language and Art ThemeTracker
Language and Art Quotes in The Time Traveler’s Wife
It’s hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he’s okay. It’s hard to be the one who stays.
I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.
[…] Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?
Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. […] Why has he gone where I cannot follow?
It’s ironic, really. All my pleasures are homey ones: armchair splendor, the sedate excitements of domesticity. All I ask for are the humble delights. A mystery novel in bed, the smell of Clare’s long red-gold hair damp from washing, a postcard from a friend on vacation, cream dispersing into coffee, the softness of the skin under Clare’s breasts, the symmetry of grocery bags sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to be unpacked. […] These are the things that can pierce me with longing when I am displaced from them by Time’s whim.
And Clare, always Clare. […] I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.
“I’m at the School of the Arts Institute; I’ve been doing sculpture, and I’ve just started to study papermaking.”
“Cool. What’s your work like?”
For the first time, Clare seemed uncomfortable. “It’s kind of…big, and it’s about…birds.” She looks at the table, then takes a sip of tea.
“Birds?”
“Well, really it’s about, um, longing.”
The next evening I’m standing in the doorway of Clare’s studio, watching her finish drawing a thicket of black lines around a little red bird. Suddenly I see Clare, in her small room, closed in by all her stuff, and I realize that she’s trying to say something, and I know what I have to do.
As I sit beside Clare and read the poem I forgive Lucille, a little, for her colossal selfishness and her monstrous dying, and I look up at Clare. “It’s beautiful,” I say, and she nods, satisfied, for a moment, that her mother really did love her. I think about my mother singing lieder after lunch on a summer afternoon […] I never questioned her love. Lucille was changeable as wind. The poem Clare holds is evidence, immutable, undeniable, a snapshot of emotion.
“What we need,” Henry says, “is a fresh start. A blank slate. Let’s call her Tabula Rasa.”
“Let’s call her Titanium White.”
[…] “Alba DeTamble.” It rolls around in my mouth as I say it.
“That nice, all the little iambs, tripling along […] ‘Alba (Latin) White. (Provencal) Dawn of Day’. Hmm.”
[…] “A white city on a hill. A fortress.”
“He made the boxes because he was lonely. He didn’t have anyone to love, and he made the boxes so he could love them, and so people would know that he existed, and because birds are free and the boxes are hiding places for the birds so they will feel safe, and he wanted to be free and safe. The boxes are so he can be a bird.”
“Say the poem about the lovers on the carpet.”
I blank, and then I remember.
[…] Angel! If there were a place that we didn’t know if, and there,
On some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed
What they could never bring to mastery here—the bold
Exploits of their high-flying hearts,
Their towers of pleasure, their ladders
That have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaning
Just on each other, trembling—and could master all of this,
Before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless dead:
Would these, then, throw down their final, forever saved-up,
Forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid
Coins of happiness before the at last
Genuinely smiling pair on the gratified
Carpet?”
“There,” says Dr. Montague, clicking off the monitor. “Everyone is serene.”
I am somehow alone with Alba in the midst of everyone. […] Alba is tunneling headfirst into me, a bone and flesh excavator of my flesh and bone, a deepener of my depths. I imagine her swimming through me, imagine her falling into the stillness of a morning pond, water parting at her velocity.
The sunlight covers Alba now. She stirs, brings her small hand over her eyes, and sighs. I write her name, and my name, and the date at the bottom of the paper.
The drawing is finished. It will serve as a record—I loved you, I made you, and I made this for you—long after I am gone, and Henry is gone, and even Alba is gone. It will say, we made you, and you are here and now.
“I made you something,” Clare says.
“Feet? I could use some feet.”
“Wings,” she says, dropping the white sheet to the floor.
The wings are huge and they float in the air, wavering in the candlelight. They are darker than the darkness, threatening but also redolent of longing, of freedom, of rushing through space. The feeling of standing solidly, on my own two feet, of running, running like flying. […] (Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future/ grows any smaller…Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart.)
“Kiss me,” Clare says, and I turn to her, white face and dark lips floating in the dark, and I submerge, I fly, I am released: being wells up in my heart.
“[…] Clare leans over me, crying, and Alba whispers, “Daddy…”
“Love you…”
“Henry—”
“Always…”
“Oh God oh God—”
“World enough…”
“No!”
“And time…”
[…] Henry’s skin is warm, his eyes are open, staring past me, he is heavy in my arms, so heavy, his pale skin torn apart, red everywhere, ripped flesh framing a secret world of blood.
I know that you have been waiting for me all your life […] Clare, like a sailor, Odysseus along and buffeted by tall waves, sometimes wily and sometimes just a play-thing of the gods. Please, Clare. When I am dead. Stop waiting and be free. […] Love the world and yourself in it. Stop waiting and be free.
[…] when I was young I didn’t understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your hair shining in the sun.
