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Handout #203 |
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Isaac Watts reflects on time |
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Isaac Watts here writes not a hymn, but a
poetic reflection on the transitoriness of human life; it is a very
eighteenth-century touch that a machine, a pocket-watch, should be the
subject of his meditation.
My watch, the solitary kind companion of my imprisonment, my faithful watch hangs by, and with a short repeated sound beats like the pulse of time, and numbers off my woes, a long succession, while the finger slow moving points out the slow moving minutes, The slower hand the hours. 0 thou dear engine! Thou little brass accountant of my life, Would but the mighty wheels of heaven and nature once imitate thy movements and whirl away these clouded wintry suns, these tedious moons these midnights! |
