It strikes! one, two, Three, four, five, six. Enough, enough, dear watch, Thy pulse hath beat enough. Now sleep and rest; Would thou could'st make the time to do so too; I'll wind thee up no more.

These lines come from Ben Jonson’s elegy on the death of his son, a poem written in the wake of the boy’s early death. In the poem Jonson addresses the child directly and reflects on the brevity of life, turning to the image of a watch striking the hours as a concrete emblem of time’s measured passing. The speaker apostrophizes the watch as if it were a living thing with a “pulse,” then imagines stopping its motion—refusing to “wind” it again—as a symbolic gesture of accepting death and wishing for rest. The domestic, intimate object helps translate private grief into a meditation on mortality.

The watch’s striking—counting up to six—compresses a lifetime into a handful of audible beats, making time feel both mechanical and cruelly finite. By calling the watch “dear” and attributing a “pulse” to it, Jonson fuses clockwork with human life: the watch becomes a surrogate body whose beating can be stopped. “I’ll wind thee up no more” suggests a refusal to keep time running, but also an acknowledgment that no human act can truly arrest loss; the only “sleep and rest” available is death’s. The wish that the watch could “make the time to do so too” underscores grief’s desire to suspend the world’s ordinary continuance when a loved one has died.