’Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain,
“You have wak’d me too soon, I must slumber again.”

These lines come from Isaac Watts’s widely read moral poem for children, “Against Idleness and Mischief,” first published in his collection of didactic verses intended to shape youthful habits and character. Watts (1674–1748), a Nonconformist minister and hymn-writer, wrote many short poems that translate adult moral instruction into vivid, memorable scenes. Here he adapts the “sluggard” figure familiar from the biblical Book of Proverbs, presenting laziness as a self-pitying voice that resents being roused. The poem contrasts the sluggard’s complaint with the industry of the bee, offering a practical, Protestant-inflected ethic of diligence and purposeful work.

The couplet personifies laziness as a whining “voice,” turning idleness into something both audible and contagious—an excuse that tries to justify itself. The sluggard’s complaint (“You have wak’d me too soon…”) captures a familiar psychological pattern: the desire to postpone effort by reframing necessary action as unreasonable intrusion. In the poem’s larger moral economy, this self-indulgent narrative is set against the natural example of the bee, whose steady labor produces sweetness and order. Watts’s point is not merely that work is virtuous, but that habits form character: repeated “slumber again” becomes a life of wasted time and diminished usefulness.