Three times the poem opens a stanza with the same two words, "Father of," and each time a different clock steps forward to claim the title. First comes the hourglass, with a water clock folded in. Then a weight-and-pendulum clock with a brass and porcelain face, and last a gold pocket watch on a fob chain. Read in order, they make a miniature history of timekeeping and a quiet argument: the more beautiful and exact clocks become, the more hungrily they treat the time they measure.
The first stanza is the gentlest. Sand and water trade places in a chiasmus, "quill of water, rope of sand," so each borrows the other's shape: water becomes a fine writing pen, sand a twisted cord. The hourglass is given a body, with a "lip" and a "waist," and then the verbs take over: "wells, brims, falls, dwells, / mines, spills, mounts, fills." Eight short verbs, no objects, and two internal rhymes (wells/dwells, spills/fills) that land like grains. They seem to cover the draining upper bulb and the heaping lower one at once, so loss and gain happen in the same breath. Then the stanza settles. Time "descends without hurry or haste," and the pairing of near-synonyms, faintly echoing "waist," gives the ending a patient calm.
The second stanza brings in machinery, and the mood turns more watchful. "Pondering hands cupping the face" makes the clock a thinker with chin in palms. The pendulum is caught in "swings (tick) and back (tock)," where the brackets work like the brief hang at the end of each swing. The hands brush past "X, V and I" as if indifferent to what they point at, and the odd compound "figurnumbered" jams "figure" and "numbered" into one word, as though the face were crowded with them. The stanza's last line is its sharpest: "serrating minutes, excising moons." *Serrating* is the cog's teeth, while *excising* is a surgeon's word. Time is being cut into pieces, and the same blade handles minutes and months.
Wealth takes over in the third stanza, with gold, jewels, Roman numerals, a milled winder and a carved lid. All this decoration, though, covers an appetite. The watch adds "the chime of gracenotes to time," and the rhyme of *chime* and *time* makes the music feel natural. Then the verbs turn bodily and agricultural: "digesting the hours, sowing the minutes, plucking the day." Hours are eaten, minutes planted, the day picked like fruit or a string. Here "fatherhood" becomes uneasy. A father provides, but the old figure of Father Time also devours. The pocket watch, the clock closest to the body, is the most intimate and the most consuming.
The poem is held together by repetition rather than end rhyme. Each stanza has seven lines, opens with "Father of," and closes on a run of actions. The lines are unmetered and uneven, but sound does the work a regular beat would. The first stanza has its clipped monosyllabic verbs, the second the hard consonants of "serrating" and "excising," and the third a stream of *-ing* forms (glazing, carving, adding, digesting, sowing, plucking) that keeps going like a ticking that never needs to stop. Even the materials are on a journey, from sand and water to brass and porcelain to gold and jewels. The verbs make the matching journey, from flowing to cutting to eating.
That double movement is what makes the poem worth reading. It refuses to treat clocks as neutral tools. Calling them fathers credits them with creating our sense of time, and the poem then asks what sort of fathers they are: patient, then exacting, then glittering and greedy. For a reader who checks a phone for the time a dozen times a day, that question still has teeth. Measuring time may also be a way of being ruled by it.