Reading Time at HSNY: From Chiming to Rhyming

This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written HSNY’s head librarian, Dr. Miranda Marraccini.

Hickory, dickory, dock.

The mouse ran up the clock.

The clock struck one,

And down he run.

Hickory, dickory, dock.

For many readers, these singsong lines will trigger some deep fragment of memory, maybe a cloudy scene at a preschool or the embrace of a grandparent’s warm lap. There are many versions of the rhyme; this one is from “The Completed Hickory Dickory Dock” (image 1). Nursery rhymes, songs, and poems often have a resonance beyond their literal meaning. Here in our library at the Horological Society of New York, we have a number of books of poetry about time and timekeepers. Some of it is funny or satirical, some thoughtful, some melancholy, but all of it tells us something about the ways people reckon with time and its limits.

Time, for watchmakers, is a concrete thing, both something to be precisely parceled out, and a livelihood. From its founding in 1866, HSNY members used songs, first in German and later in English, to bond over the difficulties and joys of watchmaking. In one of my previous posts, I quoted from an original song called “Watchmaker’s Smiles” that HSNY members sang together at their gala in 1918. The lyrics covered topics of special interest to watchmakers, like the recent popularity of “bracelet watches” or wristwatches, but also broader current events of the day like prohibition and women’s suffrage. A similar song from a 1916 gala laments the financial position of watchmakers:

While the crowd goes chasing madly

The mighty dollar bill.

Watchmakers often paid but badly,

Straining muscle, nerve, and will.

When a slick watch salesman “hypnotize[s]” his buyer into an expensive but low-quality imported watch, the watchmaker must nonetheless try to service it:

Watchmaker swears blue damnation

When he has to make it run.

All parts either bind or wabble,

Screws most overturn,

‘Scapement, depthings, all give trouble,

Rotten is the whole concern.

HSNY members used poetry, in this case set to the melody of a popular song, to express their common frustrations. Singing together probably helped them recover from the daily tensions of their jobs.

The watchmakers of HSNY would have been familiar with the main character’s pain in “Der Uhrmacher unter dem Werktisch,” the title poem in a German-language collection of poems in our library (image 2). The title translates to “The Watchmaker Under the Workbench” and the poem begins dramatically, with a first line reading, in rough translation: “Every day the same horror.” The watchmaker has dropped something on the ground and is searching for it. He is “constantly on his knees” as if he were praying; “He swears that he alone is a tormented being.” The exaggerated pathos of the scene makes it funny; in the original German, I’m sure it’s even funnier.

Unusually for the poetry books in our library, this volume is actually all about the trials and tribulations of watchmaking–not an abstract story about the passage of time or a rumination on mortality. Other translated titles of poems in this book include “The Regulator,” “The Balance Shaft,” and “A ‘Capable’ Assistant” (the last poem is an ironic lament about a dishonest employee.)

The watchmaker above has only himself to blame for dropping a screw under his bench, but other poems in our collection are more spiteful. A puzzling example occurs in the verse autobiography of 19th-century Shaker clockmaker Isaac Newton Youngs, who recounts an experience in his childhood:

‘Twas here that I did undertake

A little wooden clock to make,

But Abigail Richardson

Burnt it all up–for her own fun.

Who was this Abigail, now memorialized centuries after her death as a malicious clock-destroyer whose name, spit out like a curse, interrupts the singsong rhythm of the poem? What’s her side of the story? I couldn’t find much information about this little anecdote, which is reprinted on the back cover of “Shaker Clock Makers,” a pamphlet in our library. Youngs’ autobiography was never published and survives as a manuscript in the Winterthur Museum Garden & Library.

A number of anthologists have attempted to collect together literary quotations about clocks and watches; one in our collection is “An Anthology of Clocks and Watches” by C. A. O. Fox (image 3). Fox covers horological poetry chronologically, from Dante’s Divine Comedy up to the book’s publication date, 1947. His selection demonstrates the omnipresence of timekeeping in cultural life, both literally and metaphorically. For instance, from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Act II Scene 1:

Look, he’s winding up the watch of his wit;

     By and by it will strike.

The line demonstrates that by 1611, when “The Tempest” debuted onstage, audiences were already familiar with a watch and how it worked; they knew how to wind one; and they knew about the concept of a repeater that tells the time audibly.

Many of the lines in Fox’s selection are quoted anonymously, and might have appeared in local magazines and newspapers, so this book may be one of the few places you can read them today. Otherwise, where would you come across the immortal poem “The Find” about buying a clock that was “not a bargain” but looked like “a real antique”? The speaker shows the clock to an expert for a high fee, and here’s his assessment:

His verdict gave my pride a bump,

He said “You’ve been a silly chump,

You’d better chuck it on the dump.”

Who among us has not been humbled by a deceptive flea market find? It ain’t Shakespeare, but it’s still a memorable and relatable poem.

Another anthology in our library, “Los Números del Tiempo,” or “The Numbers of Time,” is a Spanish-language collection of poetry and riddles from the 15th Century to today. It includes a “poetic clock,” with 24 quotations, one for each hour of the day. (The concept is not unlike the Author Clock that I mentioned in a previous article about mystery novels.) In a poem called “The Discord of Watches” from the 18th century, a group of four friends arrive at different times for a banquet, leading to an argument about whose watch is accurate (see the accompanying illustration in image 4). One of the friends finally settles it by breaking out the telescope and using the stars to calculate the time.

Several books in our collection attempt to preserve aphorisms, epigraphs, and sayings about time–not all of them strictly poetry. “Nimm dir Zeit,” or “Take Your Time,” is one such anthology in German. The author, Klaus Fritz, has assembled “quotes, aphorisms and poems by philosophers, writers, scientists, poets and thinkers” to “encourage people to think about time from time to time.” Although there is naturally a bias toward German thinkers, there are some surprising names in the volume, like Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin, John Steinbeck, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of “The Little Prince“).

The illustrations by Rolf Krämer add a touch of sinister surreality to the relatively mundane text of many of the quotations. As in the case of poetry, the meaning of visual art is open to interpretation. However, I would venture that image 5 shows someone hiding their awareness of the constant tick-tock of mortality behind a mask of happiness, while a watch counts the dwindling minutes of their life. In image 6…well, I think it’s something about the human life cycle. I see some sperm approaching eggs, a couple coupling, and a tree ornamented with human heads of various ages from baby to skull.

While the volume above seems deliberately unsettling, verses in our collection more typically recount the soothing rhythms of life. One of these books, called “Die Ammen-Uhr,” or “The Nurse’s Clock,” illustrates this beautiful mundanity. All of the engravings are from a single artist working in Dresden in 1842, although this book was published later; each image portrays a stanza of the same short poem. It begins with a child crying at midnight. In the cover illustration, image 7, a concerned-looking mother, or possibly a wet nurse, tries to soothe her swaddled, screaming baby as the large clock behind her strikes midnight. I don’t blame the child for screaming, as the bell hanging in the tower above them looks extremely loud.

It’s not just people who live according to a strict schedule. In the poem, we also hear about swallows, mice, horses, and roosters. In a detail in image 8, at three in the morning, a carriage driver wakes from his straw bed on the floor, which he shares with a cat (eating a rodent breakfast) and a dog (leisurely scratching his ear). As in all the illustrations, a clock shows the time. You can faintly see the pendulum swinging, as well as the weights hanging from the movement.

These routines are all artificially regulated by the clock. When these engravings were commissioned, clocks could still be expensive consumer goods in Europe, and it seems like there could be a bit of poetic license in the depictions, since the people in this poem, even the poorest, have a working clock available in every room of the house.

In my favorite illustration in the book (image 9), a woman, probably a servant, gets scolded for not yet being out of bed at the late hour of six: “The bell strikes six / Get up, get up you lazy witch!” The lazy witch yawns, seemingly unconcerned, but in the next stanza she dutifully runs to the bakery (with the family dog in tow) to buy bread.

Finally, at the end of the poem, the women of the family prepare a hearty breakfast of rolls, butter, sugar, milk, and soup. The dog nips at the servant’s heels as she carries the bowl of hot liquid. The child strains toward his meal as another woman ties a bib around his neck. Everyone is warm; food is plentiful; steam rises in the kitchen behind them.

Ironically, for a book poem about time, the message and the illustrations are timeless. All of us live by the clock, going about our routines, waking up tired and grumpy, doing what we have to do to get through the day. The predictable meter of the poem mirrors the clock’s tick-tock, moving forward at the same steady, reassuring pace.

I’ll close with a couple of lines from one of my favorite poems about the human experience of time, “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

         Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Thomas writes about our awareness of time–the truism that the less time we have left, the more we dwell on it. When we’re children, we don’t think about the limits of our mortal lives, because those limits seem so far off as to be irrelevant. When we’re older, the idea of time passing too quickly seems omnipresent. It isn’t necessarily bad, just part of being human. Somehow we learn to live with the knowledge of our allotted time, laughing over our little jokes, scribbling our sad poems. We sing in our chains like the sea.

HODINKEE is a sponsor of the Horological Society of New York

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