Clocks
Put mortality on the wall and make it tick in your poem's own rhythm.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about clocks: time imagery, symbols and techniques, the mistakes to avoid, exercises and prompts in this free theme guide by Writory.
What this theme is
Tick may be the smallest word poetry has for mortality. A clock poem takes the vast, unwritable subject of time and gives it a face, hands, a pendulum, a small mechanical heartbeat in the hall. Poets write clocks when they want dread with a domestic address: the wait in a hospital corridor, the last hour of a visit, the childhood bedroom where a wall clock counted you to sleep. The object measures; the poem decides what is being measured.
Clocks also let a poet write about the ways time refuses to behave. Watched, a minute swells; grieving, a year vanishes. The stopped clock, the clock left unwound after a death, the kitchen clock still keeping perfect time while a family falls apart: each is a ready image for the mismatch between mechanical time and lived time, which is one of poetry's oldest quarrels.
Why poets return to it
There is a deep kinship between clocks and poems: both are machines for organising time. Meter ticks, refrains return on schedule, a line break is a held breath with a duration. When you write about a clock you are writing about your own instrument, and readers feel that resonance even when they cannot name it.
The theme is also generous to beginners because the stakes arrive built in. Nobody needs persuading that time matters. Your work is the opposite: making one clock, one hour, one wait so particular that the universal stops feeling like wallpaper. Poems that manage it tend to score well on emotion and theme alike, as many Writory entrants discover when their judged feedback arrives at month's end.
Where it comes from
Poets were racing clocks before clocks were accurate. Andrew Marvell gave the pursuit its most famous couplet in the 1650s: 'But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near.' Baudelaire made the object openly sinister in his poem on the clock, an impassive god whose finger warns and whose every second whispers remember. Emily Dickinson used a stopped clock as a figure for a death, the small mechanism refusing every effort to set it going again.
The twentieth century's best-known clock poem is an elegy: W. H. Auden's funeral lament that opens by demanding all clocks be stopped and telephones cut off, as if grief could be honoured only by halting time itself. The gesture is ancient, mourners really did stop the house clock at the hour of death, and poems keep returning to it because the wish is universal and the mechanism never obeys.
The elements that carry it
- The tick, tock and chime give a poem a soundtrack; whether they comfort or menace depends entirely on context you control.
- Hands, faces, pendulums invite quiet personification: a clock already has a body and only needs a temperament.
- The stopped or unwound clock signals death, mourning or a household where someone has ceased to care.
- Specific clock types carry class and era: grandfather clock, station clock, factory clock, cracked kitchen clock, phone lock screen.
- Winding, setting and mending are rituals of custodianship, often passed between generations, ideal for family poems.
Techniques that work
- Sync your prosody to the object: steady iambs or a two-beat refrain can make a stanza tick, and one deliberately broken rhythm marks the moment something goes wrong.
- Anchor the poem to a single hour and stay there; sixty minutes examined closely beats a lifetime summarised.
- Play mechanical time against lived time in adjacent images: the clock says four minutes passed, the speaker aged a year.
- Use the clock as the fixed witness in a room where everything else changes, then let the poem notice what it has seen.
- Try ending on an action involving the clock, winding it, stopping it, taking it down, silencing the tick, so the theme resolves in gesture rather than statement.
Mistakes to avoid
- Announcing that time flies, heals, or waits for no one. These arrive pre-worn; replace the proverb with one clock in one room at one hour.
- The alarm-clock opening as a way to start a poem, like a story, at waking. Unless the alarm itself is the subject, begin later.
- Constant heavy ticking in the language until the reader feels bludgeoned; one tick, well placed, outperforms twenty.
- Confusing the clock with the watch or the hourglass and letting the imagery smear. Pick one timepiece and learn its parts; precision is the whole game with mechanical objects.
An exercise
Sit where you can hear or see a clock and write for exactly fifteen minutes about a wait you once endured: a result, a return, a diagnosis, a train. Note where your sentences speed up and slow down, then rebuild the draft so the lines themselves enact the waiting.
A challenge
Write a poem in strict two-beat lines that mimic a tick and a tock, then break the pattern exactly once, at the poem's most important moment. Revise until that single interruption carries the emotional weight.
A prompt to start from
After a death, someone in the family must decide whether to keep winding the deceased's clock. Write the poem of the first evening it is allowed to run down.
Before you submit
- One specific timepiece, named and placed, carries the theme.
- No proverb about time survives into the final draft.
- Sound appears at least once and is used deliberately, not decoratively.
- Mechanical time and felt time visibly diverge somewhere in the poem.
- The ending is an image or act, not a reflection on mortality in general.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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