this too shall pass

O you, reasonable creature,
who longs for eternal life,
you've got a lesson here,
worthy of attention for the end of your life.
It's called the dance macabre.
Everyone pay attention to the dancer.
It's for men as well as women.
Death spares neither the small nor the large.
In this mirror, each of us can read that one day we'll have to dance like that.
It's wise to watch well.
Death takes the living.
You'll see the powerful go first,
because there's no one that death does not overcome.
It's a shame to think of it.
We're all made of the same clay.



we're doing irony and death in our final classes of understanding irony and it is so morbid. it's such a downer. i hate getting reminded of my own mortality. it creeps me out so.

but here's a more upbeat(?) and hence ironic piece:



Ladies and gentlemen, you have made most remarkable Progress,
and progress, I agree, is a boon
You have built more automobiles than are parkable,
Crashed the sound barrier, and may very soon
Be setting up juke boxes on the moon:
But I beg to remind you that, despite all that,
I, Death, still am and always will be Cosmocrat.
Still I sport with the young and daring; at my whim
The climber steps upon the rotten boulder,
The undertow catches boys as they swim,
The speeder steers onto the slippery shoulder:
With others I wait until they are older
Before assigning, according to my humour,
To one a coronary, to one a tumour.
Liberal my views upon religion and race;
Tax-posture, credit-rating, social ambition
Cut no ice with me. We shall meet face to face,
Despite the drugs and lies of your physician,
The costly eupemisms of the mortician:
Westchester matron and Bowery bum,
Both shall dance with me when I rattle my drum