Life, Death, and Eternity

[Byron In Exile]

Imagine growing up in a village where reading and writing were considered symptoms of laziness. He wrote mostly pastoral poetry, but he spent the last twenty years of his life in a lunatic asylum.


Life, Death, and Eternity, by John Clare

A shadow moving by one's side,
That would a substance seem;
That is, yet is not - though descried -
Like skies beneath the stream;
A tree that's ever in the bloom,
Whose fruit is never rife;
A wish for joys that never come,
Such are the hope of Life.

A dark, inevitable night,
A blank that will remain;
A waiting for the morning light,
Where waiting is in vain;
A gulph, where pathway never led
To show the depth beneath;
A thing we know not, yet we dread,
That dreaded thing is Death.

The vaulted void of purple sky
That everywhere extends,
That stretches from the dazzled eye,
In space that never ends;
A morning whose uprisen sun
No setting e'er shall see;
A day that comes without a noon,
Such is Eternity.