The study of some of the main extensive poems of Octavio Paz, from Piedra de sol (1957) to Pasado en claro (1975), allows us to underline the mnemonic mechanism often used by this author. A place, a date, a time of the day, trigger a temporal and sentimental journey. But the poetic I sometimes becomes a We. In the 1970s, the personal and intimate dimension of memory is completed by a collective dimension, both moral and political. The poem, then, expresses with great intensity a crisis of conscience. Nevertheless, it remains the best way of recovering the Eliotian “timeless moment” that Paz always sought, moment lost and regained through love, through the beloved’s presence – up to the threshold of death.