The shadow by my finger cast Divides the future from the past: Before it, sleeps the unborn hour, In darkness, and beyond thy power: Behind its unreturning line, The vanished hour, no longer thine: One hour alone is in thy hands— The now on which the shadow stands.
Where this text comes from
First published in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1920). This date is uncertain. Taken from the 1920 collected edition. That is the printing this text comes from, not the poem's first appearance: the volume gathers work published from 1897 onward, and which earlier book or magazine printed this poem first has not been established here. [1]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-20.
Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/henry-van-dyke-jr_poetry, poetry.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (15)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L8.
Cite this poem
Henry van Dyke Jr. (1852–1933).
“The Sun-Dial at Wells College.” First published in The Poems of Henry Van Dyke (1920).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/henry-van-dyke-jr/the-sun-dial-at-wells-college/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
More by Henry van Dyke Jr.