European Elegies/Winter/Memorial stanzas
34.MEMORIAL STANZAS
My sad mind, when night harasses,
Will with wakeful resolutions
Contemplate
How poor human life soon passes,
How approaches dissolution's
Silent fate;
How soon stilled are joy and laughter
And their loss in retrospection
Gives us grief,
How the past appears long after
Brighter in our recollection
Past belief.
Will with wakeful resolutions
Contemplate
How poor human life soon passes,
How approaches dissolution's
Silent fate;
How soon stilled are joy and laughter
And their loss in retrospection
Gives us grief,
How the past appears long after
Brighter in our recollection
Past belief.
Each man's life is but a river
Rushing onward towards the ocean
Of the dead:
Thither empires must deliver
All their glories with commotion
Lurid red;
There the rich man's golden torrent
And the pauper's rill are tending;
Great and small
Equal face their fate abhorrent,
Equal meet the dark impending
Doom of all.
Rushing onward towards the ocean
Of the dead:
Thither empires must deliver
All their glories with commotion
Lurid red;
There the rich man's golden torrent
And the pauper's rill are tending;
Great and small
Equal face their fate abhorrent,
Equal meet the dark impending
Doom of all.
From the Old Spanish of Jorge Manrique.