Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Blair

That phrase slides in like a chill draft under the door: not “night,” but the moment night starts behaving strangely. “Witching time” is a cultural trigger more than a clock reading, a shorthand for the hour when ordinary social order thins out and the imagination takes over. Blair’s choice to say “draws near” matters. It’s not a jump-scare; it’s dread on a slow approach, the kind you feel before you can name it. The line works because it treats fear as atmospheric, not event-based.

Blair, a poet in early 18th-century Britain, is writing in a world where Enlightenment confidence and old supernatural lore coexist uneasily. People are learning to speak the language of reason while still sleeping with one ear open for the language of omens. “Witching time” carries that tension: it’s folklore, yes, but also a psychological fact about darkness, fatigue, and isolation. You don’t have to believe in witches to believe in what night does to the mind.

The subtext is control. By invoking a culturally agreed-upon threshold hour, Blair primes the reader to accept heightened emotion and moral seriousness. This is a permission slip for the uncanny. The phrase doesn’t describe what’s happening; it prepares you to expect something. In that sense it’s a piece of stagecraft: he cues the lighting, lowers the temperature, and lets the audience supply its own worst images.