Tick. Tock. Comments

This is a clever poem and there's more to it than meets the eye on first reading. The sound of it for one thing - the well-placed rhymes at the ends of each stanza; the alteration of TICK and TOCK, which take on a very heavy sound when read outloud; the interplay of ideas like THE NIGHT GOES BY TOO FAST and the clock sounds. I agree with Allan: the first stanza is relatively benign, but in the second, time races us toward fear of the end. As Andrew Marvell put it. AND AT MY BACK I ALWAYS HEAR TIME'S WINGED CHARIOT HURRYING NEAR.