“An Invaluable Acquisition”: Sandglasses in Romantic Literature

ABSTRACT

The sandglasses that appear in the literature of the Romantic period were far more than outmoded remnants of the pre-industrial past. Although their medieval iconographical connotations persisted, they continued to serve pragmatic functions in important social rituals. They featured prominently in contemporaneous discourses about temporality, and their abiding cultural relevance is overtly manifest in many literary descriptions, metaphors, and allusions. This article explores such references before focusing specifically on philosophical contexts, and the writings of Coleridge in particular. His sandglass-based descriptions and analogies provide unexpectedly illuminating insights into the emergence of distinctively Romantic attitudes toward horology, the practicalities of time telling, atomism, and finitude. Although necessarily fragmentary, this article reveals, for the first time, the rich polysemic intricacy of the sandglasses that served so many different purposes in British Romantic literature.

Notes

1 Problems of nomenclature must be addressed from the outset. “Sandglass” is inaccurate, since these devices were rarely filled with sand, yet “hourglass” is equally troublesome since half-hour-glasses, two-hour-glasses, and so on, were just as common. For reasons of consistency, “sandglass” will be used throughout this article, with full awareness of its imprecision.

2 My translation.

3 See also Tomalin's “‘the most perfect instrument’: Reassessing Sundials in Romantic Literature.”

4 Clare's awareness of Bloomfield is manifest textually: the latter's injunction to the falling sand to “jog along thy destined way” is echoed in Clare's clause, “[s]o jog thou on, through hours of doom’d distress” (Bloomfield 56; Clare 162).

5 See my “‘the most perfect instrument’: Reassessing Sundials in Romantic Literature” and “Ecological Horology: The Nature of Time during the Romantic Period.”

6 The device itself is described in 534–37.

7 The German adjective unübersehbar means “obvious,” “clear,” and “evident.”

8 My translation.

9 )( is the astrological symbol for Pisces, the two fish “tied together by the tails,” which Coleridge deployed to denote direct opposition. See also Hutton 189.

10 My translation.

11 See Milnes, Evans, and my “‘This Go-Cart of the Understanding’: Contextualizing Hazlitt's Criticisms of Logic.”

12 Despite their name, sandglasses usually contained finely ground eggshells, so the use of mortal remains would have been highly unusual (see Welland 251). Jonson's poem may have inspired Robert Herrick's “The Houre-glasse” (pub. 1648), though the device in the latter is filled with the tears of the lover, rather than the ashes (see Cain and Connolly 43).