In many a high and dreary sleeping place.Īs the opening lines of Eliot’s 1935 poem ‘Burnt Norton’ make clear, time is a major theme.
He steals down streets where sickly arc-lights sing,Īnd wanly mock his young and shameful face That limps to cover from the angry chase, The wakened life that feels his quickening swayĪnd barnyard voices shrilling ‘It is day!’ He bears a sword of flame but not to harm The little twittering birds laugh in his way When Dawn strides out to wake a dewy farmĪcross green fields and yellow hills of hay Not the most poetic of subjects, you may think, but then ‘alarm clocks’ is a metaphor here: as Kilmer points out in a poem that is really about dawn and morning, there are various ways in which people are called to the business of their day… But he (yes, ‘Joyce’ is male in this case) also wrote others, including this fine sonnet about alarm clocks. Kilmer (1886-1918) is known for one poem: ‘ Trees’. What can clocks tell us? Quite a lot, according to Carl Sandburg in this experimental free-verse poem about the various kinds of clock he observes, from the alarm clock that gets people up at half-seven in the morning to the travel clock an actress carries around with her to various hotels.
