Human Life

On the Denial of Immortality

• If dead, we cease to be ; if total gloom
• Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare
• As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,
• Whose sound and motion not alone declare,
• But are their whole of being ! If the breath
• Be Life itself, and not its task and tent,
• If even a soul like Milton's can know death ;
• O Man ! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant,
• Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes !
• Surplus of Nature's dread activity,
• Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finished vase,
• Retreating slow, with meditative pause,
• She formed with restless hands unconsciously.
• Blank accident ! nothing's anomaly !
• If rootless thus, thus substanceless thy state,
• Go, weigh thy dreams, and be thy hopes, thy fears,
• The counter-weights !—Thy laughter and thy tears
• Mean but themselves, each fittest to create
• And to repay the other ! Why rejoices
• Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good ?
• Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner's hood ?
• Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices,
• Image of Image, Ghost of Ghostly Elf,
• That such a thing as thou feel'st warm or cold ?
• Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold
• These costless shadows of thy shadowy self ?
• Be sad ! be glad ! be neither ! seek, or shun !
• Thou hast no reason why ! Thou canst have none ;
• Thy being's being is contradiction.