Life & Wisdom Quote by Ben Jonson

Time becomes the villain, and Jonson wants machinery powerful enough to bully it. "O, for an engine" lands with early-modern bite: in an age newly enchanted by devices, instruments, and the promise of human ingenuity, he reaches for tech not to build a bridge or win a war but to commit a small, intimate act of rebellion against hours themselves. The wish is extravagant on purpose. You can hear the stagecraft in it: a rhetorical flourish that knows it cannot be literal, yet insists on being emotionally exact.

The phrasing toggles between two targets. "Keep back all clocks" is domestic, civic, modern - time as regimented measurement, the emerging discipline of schedules and labor. "Make the sun forget his motion" jumps to the cosmic register - time as divine order, the great celestial metronome. Jonson stitches them together to show how thoroughly time has colonized human life: from the household clock to the universe.

Subtext-wise, the line is less about fantasy science than about desire under constraint. Renaissance poetry constantly negotiates with transience: beauty fades, pleasure ends, the beloved changes, the body fails. Jonson's "engine" is the dream of a workaround, a cheat code against mortality and separation. It's also a sly nod to the period's obsession with control - the same culture that measures the world more precisely also feels the loss more acutely. The line works because it makes a private ache sound like a public emergency, turning longing into an engineering problem and revealing, in the process, how impossible the fix really is.