Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.

The passage is an urgent exhortation to treat time as a moral and existential responsibility rather than a neutral backdrop. Time is personified as something evasive—“smooth, slippery, faithless”—that vanishes unless actively attended to. The repeated imperatives (“Hold fast,” “Guard,” “watch”) suggest vigilance: a disciplined, almost ascetic attention to the present. The closing lines shift from mere preservation to purposeful living: each moment should be made “sacred” by conscious awareness and by giving it “clarity and meaning,” implying that fulfillment is not found in abstract plans but in the intentional shaping of the hour at hand.