Revision of "Clocks and Lovers"

Klara Sulce

Mr.Perez

English AP

11 December 2011

“Clocks and the Lovers” by W.H. Auden refers to the love that we all experience in life that can seem eternal at times and stimulate us to be forever passionate. Auden brings the reader's attention to the truth about time, and how it fades our love away without sympathy. He explains that love has no meaning in the beginning of the poem and demonstrates it through understatement. The reader's feelings are exaggerated as being strong enough to make a “river jump over the mountain.” The overall mental attitude of the lover is one of everlasting delight and romantic happiness.

As the poem progresses and we grasp onto the lover's feelings, our attention is shifted to that of the clocks’, who tell the mere truth. The clocks are powerful, for they end the lover's time. This is that state of strain and business of society with “headaches and worry, vaguely life leaking away.” The clocks believe that this is the fate that was chosen for lovers. Auden's language and imagery change extremely from the lover’s perspective to that of the clocks’. The lover demonstrates his emotion by song and the clock by “whirr and chime”, which set the time right away for the reader. All of the animals that the lover mentions are loving and joyous, from the salmon, to the geese, then to the rabbits.

Thus, the lover’s use of language is reflective of solely one emotion, Love.

The clocks however, show many signs of love in a different way that is through coughing, worry, breaking, stares, cracking, and distress. They also go on to courageously state, “You can not conquer time.” These apprehensions of reality depict a depressing sense of love and how time fades it away day by day. Like the death of his lover, the last line emphasizes the finality of life and an end void of

purpose.