The objective of this work is to relate the poetry of Camilo Pessanha to a questioning about the art of poetry itself, analyzing the relationship between the feeling of time and the activity of poetic creation which may be perceived in his work, a relationship which can be established through the title of his only book of poems: Clepsydra. The clepsydra, an object connected to the counting of time attributed to the orators in ancient Greece, points, therefore, to a fusion between time and discourse, allowing us to engage in a reflection on the act of writing.