Blue Clock

The Blue Clock is an ordinary household timepiece that John McGahern secretly takes from the sideboard during his mother’s funeral. Held against his face in the laurels, it gives him a private measure of the ceremony he cannot bear to witness with the mourners. Its steady counting makes the funeral’s irreversible progress tangible, while its return to the sideboard closes a brief, painful separation between the household object and the grief surrounding it.

Place in the Household and Funeral

Before the funeral, the clock belongs to the domestic order: it stands on the sideboard, where it can be checked without ceremony. On the morning of the burial, however, the narrator watches its minutes disappear until, close to eleven, he can no longer remain inside the house. Making sure that no one is watching, he takes the clock and carries it out along the avenue, past the elder tree, toward the great oak and the thick laurels on the hill to the Bawn. A familiar object has been removed from its ordinary place, but not to be discarded or used for a practical errand. He brings it into hiding so that he can keep watch over time while avoiding the assembled mourners.

The clock’s physical presence matters. The narrator holds its cold glass to his face beneath the evergreens, with a wren for company, while the church fills and the funeral begins. The cool surface and the passing minutes bring an immediate, material scale to an event that otherwise threatens to overwhelm him. He does not stop the ceremony or alter its course; he holds on to the clock as the minutes beat away. Its usual function—marking time—becomes a means of staying beside the funeral from a distance.

A Private Measure of the Rites

From the laurels, the narrator follows the Mass by its successive movements. He hears the Latin opening and watches the ceremony through memory and attention, weeping with the clock in his hands. The church is not empty: altar boys, priests, his father, and Uncle Jimmy take their places, and the mourners bring offerings to the small table. Yet the narrator is physically elsewhere, with the clock as his companion and the ritual unfolding beyond his sight. The object thus marks a separation not from the funeral’s duration, but from its public participation.

That separation continues as the Mass gives way to the burial. The priests bless the coffin; the bearers carry it out into sunlight, and the crowd follows to the grave. The clock keeps beating in the narrator’s hands while his mother’s coffin passes from church to grave and the earth is put back over it. In the funeral’s public sequence, candles are extinguished, the coffin is lowered, and the grave is filled. In the hidden sequence, he remains with the clock, measuring the passage he cannot reverse. The two sequences meet in time but not in place: the mourners accompany the coffin, while the narrator keeps his own vigil under the laurels.

The River and the Clock’s Return

When the burial is over, the narrator comes out of the laurels almost blind, although the avenue is shaded. He sees two men with fishing rods coming toward the barracks and runs to ask whether they are going out in the boat. They are considering it, but one advises him to miss the outing because it would not look good if he were absent when the others returned. When they ask what he is doing with the clock, he offers the lame explanation that he brought it out to look at the time. He follows them to the river anyway, hoping they will relent, and watches them push the boat into the current and row toward Oakport Estate.

The clock goes back with him. He hides it under his arm as he enters the house and replaces it on the sideboard without anyone noticing. Its return restores its place in the household, but not its earlier innocence as an unnoticed fixture. The narrator now connects it to the hours spent apart from the funeral and to the desire to follow the boat almost as soon as his mother has been buried. The clock has recorded time; it has also accompanied a choice he judges harshly.

Meaning and Narrative Function

The narrator is ashamed that he wanted to leave for the river, calling the desire selfish and recognizing that he had been unable to watch even one hour with his mother. The clock makes that conflict concrete: he takes it from the house to remain alone with the funeral’s passing minutes, then carries it back while the temptation of the river persists. After the burial, he thinks that one day he will make everything up to his mother by saying Mass for her, but the thought turns to anguish when he remembers that the dream has changed: she will not be there. The clock cannot preserve her or undo his absence. It can only accompany the realization that the funeral has reached its end.

As a narrative object, the Blue Clock links the ceremony’s public timetable to the narrator’s concealed experience. Its beat continues through the Mass, the procession, and the burial, giving the account a persistent measure even as grief distorts the narrator’s sense of what he can endure. Once he returns it to the sideboard, the object’s ordinary domestic role resumes, but the reader has seen it removed, held close, questioned, and hidden. That brief interruption makes visible the distance between participating in a family’s mourning and being able to bear it.