Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
And then the clock collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck.

These lines are from A. E. Housman’s poem “The Carpenter’s Son,” one of his bleak, ballad-like narratives of rural England. Housman (1859–1936), a classical scholar as well as a poet, often wrote about young men facing loss, injustice, and early death, frequently in a Shropshire setting. In this poem, a condemned man is brought to the gallows; the quoted stanza captures the final seconds before execution, when he is already “strapped” and “noosed” and waiting for the clock to strike the hour. The tower clock’s chime becomes the impersonal signal that time—and the sentence—has run out.

The stanza compresses the terror of imminent death into a few hard beats. “Strapped” and “noosed” reduce the man to a body prepared for killing; “nighing his hour” makes execution feel like an appointment kept by time itself. His counting and cursing are small, human gestures of resistance against a fate that is already mechanically arranged. The tower clock is personified as if it “collect[s]… strength,” suggesting a deliberate, almost muscular force behind the strike; yet it is also a symbol of public order and inevitability. Housman’s effect is to show how a life can be ended by a routine civic mechanism—timekeeping turned into deathkeeping.