Even this shall pass
“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
-David M. Eagleman
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) was an American poet. His father had a successful business as a lumber merchant, and he was also a local politician. However, while Edwin was studying at Harvard University, his family suffered financial crises, which forced him to give up his studies. His two elder brothers also ended up in poverty and died early. He himself faced financial hardship till his luck improved in 1904 when his poetry came to the notice of President Theodore Roosevelt. He went on to publish twenty-eight books of poetry over his lifetime and won the first Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His exposure to the cruel twists and turns of fate was reflected in his poems.
One of the examples is his poem ‘The House on the Hill.’ This poem is in the public domain and I am reproducing it here.
“They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.
Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.
Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,
And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.
There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.”
In this poem, the residents of the house are no longer living there. Moreover no one around knows anything about them. Not only are they gone, but their influence on the place (whether good or bad) has ended, too.
Another poem that clearly shows how fame and power vanish without a trace is ‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famous English poet. This poem is also within the public domain and I have reproduced it here.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
Even in his time, the vain Ozymandias was being subtly mocked by the very sculptor who had been commissioned to immortalize him in stone. Ozymandias may have been powerful once but his colossal bust had been shattered by a far greater power: Nature. His ‘works’ were also reduced to dust and only the desert reigned for miles and miles. Despite all his power, even his mark on the world was not lasting.
This realization about the ephemeral nature of life is at once sobering and liberating. Truly, we need not waste our limited time here on ‘making a mark on the world’. Our name won’t last, and for the little time that it does, we won’t be around to see it. Our time is best spent nurturing those parts of the world that we come in contact with and which we have some agency over. Because even this shall pass.
