Featured Poem: To His Watch, When He Could Not Sleep by Lord Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury

Last Monday saw our special Pink Think Day at Calderstones Mansion House - as well as raising money for Breast Cancer Campaign, TRO staff from all across the country came together at the Mansion House to enjoy a day of thinking, reflecting and doing quite a bit of shared reading too.

At the latest Think Day as well as making 'A Ritual to Read to Each Other', we also focused our attentions on reading poems from before the nineteenth century, sharing old poems and making them new. We found, perhaps surprisingly in some senses, that these pieces of literature had as much relevance to our lives and issues we face now as they did when they were first written  - it's certainly given us a renewed opportunity to look at a whole wealth of new (old) poetry.

Lord Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury lived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and as well as being a poet was also a soldier, diplomat, historian and religious philosopher.This particular selection is something we can all identify with, although we hope reading it wiill help you sleep soundly rather than keep you up later this evening.

To His Watch, When He Could Not Sleep

Uncessant Minutes, whil’st you move you tell
The time that tells our life, which though it run
Never so fast or farr, you’r new begun
Short steps shall overtake; for though life well

May scape his own Account, it shall not yours,
You are Death’s Auditors, that both divide
And summ what ere that life inspir’d endures
Past a beginning, and through you we bide

The doom of Fate, whose unrecall’d Decree
You date, bring, execute; making what’s new
Ill and good, old, for as we die in you,
You die in Time, Time in Eternity.

Lord Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury