Life & Mortality Quote by Barnabe Barnes

A bracing slap of humility dressed in velvet meter: Barnes reduces the human animal to “a mass of dust,” not as a clever flourish but as an ideological act. In a late-Elizabethan culture steeped in memento mori imagery and Protestant anxiety about the soul, this is less personal despair than a disciplined worldview. “World’s momentary slave” turns the Renaissance fantasy of mastery - courtly ambition, imperial horizon, the self-fashioning individual - into a short lease with no renewal clause. The insult is strategic. It reorders prestige: what looks like agency is really a temporary conscription under time, appetite, and circumstance.

The phrase “in state of our old Adam made” is the theological pressure point. “State” carries a double charge: condition and political order. Humanity is born not into freedom but into a fallen constitution. Barnes is invoking Original Sin as biography, making spiritual doctrine feel like bodily fact. The subtext is an argument against worldly confidence, including the confident poetry of the age that likes to immortalize love, beauty, and patronage. Barnes is basically saying: your sonnet is a wreath on compost.

The line’s propulsion comes from its compressed timetable: “Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.” The repetition of “soon” is a drumbeat, a rhetorical throttle that denies the reader a spacious life narrative. “Flourishing” is allowed, even acknowledged - then immediately yanked back into “fade.” It’s not anti-life; it’s anti-illusion, insisting that any bloom worth celebrating must be measured against its inevitable undoing.