At two o’clock on an autumn morning, the clocks are set back and the world is officially given an hour it never expected. Leonora Speyer, an American poet and concert violinist who won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Fiddler’s Farewell, wrote in the early twentieth century, when daylight saving time was still a relatively new wartime economy measure and many people resented having their clocks meddled with. Her poem “The ‘Extra Hour’” turns that bureaucratic adjustment into a quiet argument about whether time can truly be given back—and who, if anyone, can receive it.
The opening imagines a small rebellion among the instruments that measure our days. Each “sleepy clock” is shown lifting “a pedant’s protest to the skies” from “many a town’s high tower.” The stuttering “Tick-tock — tick-tock — / Rude hands presume to put us back — / Tick-tack — / One hour!” gives the clocks a cranky, mechanical voice. They call human hands “rude,” as if adjusting time is an impertinence against nature. The speaker then widens the question: “Time will not wait, they say, / Nor sun: / Yet is this vast thing done?” The mention of sun and moon reminds us that clock-time and cosmic time are not the same. The central tension is whether a legal hour can force the slow day to “submit” or make the “calm moon cower.” The poem’s answer is not a simple yes or no; instead it shifts toward human experience.
Speyer’s musical training shows in the shape and sound of the lines. Rather than settle into a regular meter, the poem moves from longer, almost protesting lines to short, broken phrases, so the reader feels the clock’s stutter and then the hush of night. Rhymes are muted or delayed, as in “tower” and “hour,” “flight” and “night,” “flower” and “hour.” This keeps the piece from sounding like a neat song; it sounds like a live argument that keeps changing registers. The repeated “ock” and “ack” sounds in “clock,” “tock,” and “tack” imitate the very machinery the poem also personifies.
The imagery turns from the civic tower to the wider darkness. The speaker addresses “shadowy wings that lean in flight, / O night!” and urges the night to linger before “your star-eyed birds are flown.” That phrase “star-eyed birds” makes the night feel winged and fragile, as if darkness is a living creature. Morning is not seen as gentle. It will “flower / Its wide, inexorable buds of light.” The word “inexorable” is the poem’s strongest warning: dawn cannot be stopped by any clock. Yet the final two lines offer a quiet counterforce: “Clasped lovers shall have known / That added hour!” The word “clasped” matters because it is bodily and intimate. The lovers do not merely notice the extra hour; they “know” it through each other, and in that knowing they make it real.
What makes Speyer’s poem significant is its insistence that measured time and lived time are not the same. In an age increasingly governed by schedules, railway time, and wartime efficiency, an “extra hour” could seem like an administrative trick. Speyer grants it meaning by placing it in the arms of lovers. The hour finally belongs not to the protesting clocks or the inexorable sun but to two people who have the attention and desire to inhabit it.