Explore "Human Life on the Denial of Immortality" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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 each 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.