Come night, strike hour.
Days go, I endure.

In these two compressed lines, the speaker registers time’s impersonal advance—night arriving, the clock striking, days passing—against the stubborn fact of continued existence: “I endure.” The syntax feels like a tolling mechanism, as if the poem itself mimics the clock’s beat. The effect is both stoic and weary: endurance is not triumph so much as persistence under the pressure of passing time. Read in Apollinaire’s modernist key, the fragment also suggests the urban experience of measured hours and repetitive days, where the self is reduced to a single act of holding on.