As "Out of Time" begins, a speaker standing in a "Harbour[]" and looking out to sea has a sudden striking vision of "Time." They see "Time flowing like a hundred yachts," a simile that suggests a complicated kind of movement:
- On the one hand, Time is moving like a parade of sailboats: individual moments are passing by in stately procession, "fly[ing] behind the daylight" as if trying to catch up with the setting sun.
- On the other, time is "flowing" continuously, all in one big motion, more like the sea that carries the boats than the boats themselves.
This complex vision might be inspired by the speaker's surroundings. Their vision of those metaphorical yachts with sails "foxed with air" presents a vivid image of sails that appear spotted and speckled ("foxed") as they ripple in the wind—just the sort of thing the speaker might actually be observing.
Alongside Time's flowing, sailing motion, the speaker perceives Time's power to "pierc[e]." As the speaker puts it in another simile, Time stabs right through things:
[...] like the quince-bright, bitter slats
Of sun gone thrusting under Harbour's hair.
In other words, the sun pierces the waters of the harbor (here imagined metaphorically as the harbor's weaving "hair") in bars as sharp and golden as a quince (a pear-like fruit). That imagery feels at once lovely and harsh, touching the tongue as well as the eye: the piercing sunlight is golden and gorgeous, but "bitter," too.
The touch of time, the speaker will go on to suggest, is just as bright and bitter. The idea that Time (which the speaker will personify as a godlike male figure) can flow, sail, and stab captures the alarming feelings the speaker struggles with as they gaze at the water: that Time is swishing past them, leaving them behind, and killing them, all at once.
"Out of Time" will explore these ideas over the course of three sections, each of which takes the form of an English sonnet. That means:
- Each of the poem's sections uses 14 lines, rhymed ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
- The poem is written in iambic pentameter—lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Or Time, | the bo- | ny knife, | it runs | me through."
Kenneth Slessor's use of this traditional shape invites Time into the poem in yet another way. The sonnet has a history reaching back to the Middle Ages. Perhaps in turning to the form here, the poet hopes to drop an anchor in the tide of Time.