Human Life

by Samuel Coleridge

If dead, we cease to be ; if total gloomSwallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fareAs summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,Whose sound and motion not alone declare,But are their whole of being ! If the breathBe 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.