What the song is about
The song walks through time step by step. First come the
days of the week, then some
months of the year, then the
four seasons, and finally years and decades. The chorus says that time keeps moving and that every ending is also a new start. It feels both
beautiful and strange.
Useful words and expressions
- Days of the week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. They always start with a capital letter in English.
- Months: January, April, August, October. These also start with a capital letter.
- Seasons: spring, summer, autumn (American English: fall), winter.
- days go by: time passes.
- the clock is spinning: time is moving fast.
- Every end is a new beginning: when something finishes, something new starts.
- work is done: the work is finished.
- having fun: enjoying yourself.
- in the blink of an eye: very quickly.
- the calendar is turning: time is passing, page by page.
- The decades fade, the memories stay: the years pass, but we remember.
- hide and seek: a children's game in which one person hides and another looks for them.
Grammar
- Present simple for facts and regular events: Monday morning starts the week, January brings the cold, Autumn leaves fall to the ground.
- Present continuous for something happening now or changing: the clock is spinning, time is moving, spring is blooming, another year is passing through.
- Adjectives after be: August sun is hot and bright, April rain is very nice.
- Prepositions of time: in normal speech we say on Monday, in January and in spring. The song leaves out these prepositions to keep the lines short.
Careful: lyrics bent for the rhyme
- Tuesday, Wednesday, hide and seek is there to rhyme with week. The phrase has no clear meaning here, so don't use it to talk about weekdays.
- October shadows in the night has no verb. In a normal sentence you would say In October, there are shadows in the night.
- Saturday and Sunday, having fun also has no full verb. Normally you would say On Saturday and Sunday, we have fun.
- the future is nigh uses an old, poetic word chosen to rhyme with eye. In everyday English, say the future is near.
- A minute, an hour, we cannot reverse puts the object first for the rhyme. The normal word order is We cannot reverse a minute or an hour, or more naturally We cannot turn back time.
