Life & Mortality Quote by Conrad Aiken

Aiken turns beauty into a bill that always comes due. The sing-song cadence and repeated “All lovely things” read almost like a nursery rhyme, which is exactly the trap: he uses a comforting, familiar rhythm to smuggle in an unsentimental fact about time. Loveliness doesn’t just change; it “fade[s] and die[s].” The verbs are blunt, final, physical. Any romantic softness gets cut with mortality.

The pivot is “youth,” personified as a spendthrift: “bravely spending” suggests swagger, not wisdom. Aiken is needling the cultural pose of youthful fearlessness - the idea that intensity today can somehow outrun consequence. “Bravely” is doing double duty: it’s both admiration and a faint sneer, as if courage is being wasted on the wrong project. The subtext is economic and moral at once: youth treats its gifts like cash, but it’s living on credit.

Then the line that stings: “Will beg a penny by and by.” Not “ask,” not “need,” but “beg,” and not a fortune, but a penny - the smallest unit of dignity. That miniature coin makes the future feel humiliatingly cramped. Written by a modernist steeped in psychological realism, Aiken isn’t offering a sentimental lament; he’s staging a quiet cruelty in the arithmetic of aging. The point isn’t that endings happen. It’s that we collaborate with them, confusing abundance for permanence until the body, the market, and time repossess the glow.