Four sentences, each dressed as ancient wisdom, and not one of them quite explains itself. That is the trick of "Proverbial (4)". It borrows the voice of folk sayings, which are short, confident and a little bossy, but it withholds the neat moral we expect from them. What the reader gets instead is a mood, and the mood darkens steadily: from a clock, to a light going out, to a house, to death.
The first line works almost entirely through sound. "Knock on a clock, owe an owl" has two halves of two beats each, and each half is built on a near-echo: *knock* and *clock* rhyme outright, while *owe* and *owl* share their opening sound without quite matching. The phrase also seems to remember "knock on wood," the superstitious gesture for warding off bad luck. Swap the wood for a clock and the gesture turns uneasy: knocking on time itself, as if to ask for a favour, or to test whether anyone answers. The owl, meanwhile, arrives with a debt attached. We never learn what is owed or why, but an owl is a bird of night and traditional wisdom, so the line hints that time costs us something and that someone, or something, is keeping count.
The owl returns in line two, now paired with a sage: "A sage and an owl meet where a light is out." Both are stock symbols of wisdom, so the sentence is pleasingly redundant, two wise figures meeting like old colleagues. But they meet in the dark. The poem leaves open whether that is a joke or a serious point. Perhaps wisdom is most at home where nothing can be seen. Perhaps the "light" that has gone out is understanding itself, and the wise are simply the ones who can still find each other without it. The vowel in *owl* is picked up again in *out*, and then in *house* in the next line, a faint sound-thread pulling the poem along.
Line three is the strangest and the richest. "Never was a house pleased with the arms that hang there" copies the grammar of a proverb ("Never was a…") while turning its subject into something odd: a house with feelings. The word *arms* is double-edged. It could mean weapons or a coat of arms displayed on a wall, in which case "house" is also a noble family, and the sentence says that no family has ever been satisfied by its inherited emblems of power. It could just as easily mean limbs, hanging limp, which brings in exhaustion, defeat, or something grimmer. The poem refuses to choose, and that refusal is the point. A real proverb narrows meaning down; this one lets it multiply.
The final line sounds the most like a verdict: "We die in fear, not for mirth's sake." Its rhythm is the steadiest in the poem, four firm beats with the hard *k* of *sake* closing it off like a latch. It twists a familiar idiom, since we say "for pity's sake" or "for heaven's sake," and *mirth* is a deliberately old-fashioned word to put in that slot. We also say people "die laughing," and this line quietly denies that comfort. Death, it claims, comes with fear, not with laughter. After three riddling lines, the first plain, human *we* arrives, and the poem stops being a game of sayings and admits what its clocks, owls and dark rooms have been circling.
The poem matters because of the gap it opens between the *form* of wisdom and its *content*. Proverbs tell us they speak for everyone and hold the answer, and these four lines keep that confident tone while handing the work back to the reader. The number in the title suggests one of a series, which fits the idea: the sayings keep coming, none of them settles anything, and each leaves the unease a little deeper. It rewards the slow reading a riddle demands, and it shows how much meaning a few sounds and a borrowed tone of authority can carry.