Fairport Convention / The Airing Cupboard Tapes / 1981
Who Knows Where the Time Goes
wistful, resigned, quietly consoled
A meditation on mortality and constancy, written by Sandy Denny and here performed by Fairport Convention (who backed her on the original recording), the song sets natural cycles of migration and season against a human speaker's resolve to remain steady in love and unafraid of time's passage. Its quiet, unresolved refrain turns the question of time into the emotional center rather than answering it.
mortality and impermanence the passage of time constancy in love nature as metaphor acceptance
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses an unnamed 'you' and later a beloved, moving from observation of migrating birds to a personal declaration of steadfastness; the voice is intimate and reflective, not performing for an audience so much as thinking aloud.
What happens
The song opens with an image of birds leaving as autumn arrives, prompting a question about how creatures know when to go. The speaker contrasts this instinctual departure with her own inertia by the fire, claiming no awareness of time passing. A second verse shifts to a desolate shoreline where the addressee's friends are leaving, paralleling the birds; the speaker again insists she will stay. In the final movement, the presence of love reframes the question of time entirely — no longer a source of dread but something absorbed into the security of companionship, with the cyclical return of the birds in spring now offered without fear.
How it's built
The song moves through three verses of similar shape, each ending in a spoken realization, followed by the same repeated refrain question. The lack of a bridge or key change reinforces its circularity; instead, meaning accumulates through subtle shifts in the verses' final lines, culminating in the last verse's alteration of the refrain to ask about love rather than time alone.
Section by section
Opening verse
The image of birds departing an evening sky introduces the idea of instinctual knowledge about timing, immediately undercut by the speaker's rhetorical question about how such knowledge is even possible. This sets up the song's central tension between natural certainty and human uncertainty.},label2:{}}],
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Migrating birds and changing seasons stand in for mortality and the transience of relationships, giving abstract dread a concrete, natural image.
- refrain
- The repeated question about time's whereabouts resists resolution, functioning less as a hook than as a philosophical shrug that deepens with each repetition.
- parallelism
- The structural echo between birds leaving and friends leaving draws an implicit comparison between instinctual and social forms of departure.
- anaphora
- Repeated declarations of not counting or fearing time build a rhetorical insistence that works against the uncertainty voiced in the refrain.
Reading it
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Context
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Listen for
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About Fairport Convention
Fairport Convention are an English folk rock band, formed in 1967 by guitarists Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol, bassist Ashley Hutchings and drummer Shaun Frater. They started out influenced by American folk rock, with a set list dominated by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs and a sound that earned them the nickname "the British Jefferson Airplane".
1967 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue