The clock of life is wound but once
And no man has the power
To tell just where the hands will stop
At late or early hour
To lose one’s wealth is sad indeed
To lose one’s health is more
To lose one’s soul is such a loss
As no man can restore
The present only is our own
Live, love, toil with a will
Place no faith in “tomorrow” – for
The clock may then be still…
© Robert H. Smith 1932, 1982
with thanks to Uncle Eric…
and for photo by scalespeeder…
2 responses so far ↓
1 HelenS // Jul 17, 2008 at 11:05 am
Great poem.
Being the mildly nerdish type that I am (note: only “mildly nerdish”), I immediately Google-d this and found two possible authors’ names associated with this poem: Sue Barber and Darlene Virginia Quarles. (The latter looks like an anagram to me, but that’s my crossword mentality for you.)
However, infinitely more usefully I found a clock which tells me how many seconds I have to live (www.deathclock.com). How useful is that?! [I did have to guess how fat I was, but think I was fair.]
Only 1,592,326,860 seconds to go, then.
Oops, now it’s 1,592,326,839.
Bugger, it’s going too fast!
No time to waste in worrying about trivial things then. Just get on with the important part of life. I don’t need to spell it out; it begins with “L”.
2 ShaunO // Jul 17, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Good point, oops, not good to not attribute
Other web trawling searching on “The clock of life is wound but once
And no man has the power” turned up two things:
a) this poem is very often re-quoted out there in the ‘webiverse’, and
b) that indeed its attributable – most consensus seems to land on Robert H. Smith by the looks
Updated post to attribute.
Death clock is pretty goofy
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