Another Style...for example

A clock can be defined as an instrument, other than a watch, for measuring or indicating time, but in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Masque of Red Death, the clock is much more than that. The clock is the timepiece of man’s mortality, the very thing man fears.

Poe paints the clock ebony and places it in a chamber shrouded with velvet tapestries and scarlet stained glass windows. The revelers are unaware of the ticking of time, as they waltz the night away, until the clock strikes the hour. It is then that the orchestra ceases to play and the revelers stop their twirling, and “There was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation” (2). Once the toll ceases, the revelry begins again and the partygoers swear to not allow the chimes to have the same effect on them again.

The clock does strike again. It is the twelfth hour that man fears most. “And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died in the despairing posture of his fall” (4). It was then and only then that the clock ceased its chiming. For just in our lives today, we cannot hide from our mortality. The clock still ticks until the very end.