Life & Wisdom Quote by Amy Lowell

There is something bracingly unsentimental in Lowell’s phrasing, like a Victorian moral lesson stripped of its lace. “Must” turns the line into a decree, not a lament; “now and again” makes the violence feel routine, almost managerial. The real provocation is the passive voice: “must be sacrificed” dodges the question everyone wants to ask - sacrificed by whom, for what, and who gets to call it “providing”? Lowell compresses an entire social order into one sentence: progress as a machine that runs on expendable bodies.

Coming from a poet associated with modernism, the line reads less like a rallying cry than a cold audit of the bargain behind nationhood, industry, and patriarchy. “A man” is deliberately generic, a unit, which is precisely the point. Individual lives are treated as interchangeable inputs in the story societies tell themselves about continuity and improvement. The phrase “next generation of men” doubles down on that: the future is framed as male inheritance, a lineage built through attrition. Whether Lowell intended critique or grim acceptance, the subtext leans accusatory: civilizations love to dress sacrifice up as destiny.

In the early 20th century - an era shadowed by mass labor exploitation and on the cusp of World War I’s mechanized slaughter - this kind of line lands with extra force. It anticipates how modernity would rationalize death as investment, turning “providing” into a euphemism that makes the sacrifice sound like care.