Life & Wisdom Quote by Allen Tate

Aging, here, isn’t a softening. It’s an education in how quickly moral poses collapse under history’s pressure. Tate stages three selves across three ages: the boy who wants violence to mean something ("For honor"), the young adult who flirts with pacifist purity ("not to shoot at all"), and the man who arrives at a darker, brisker realism: if the chance comes, you take it. The line break after "only" is a sly tell; even at twelve, "honor" is already being rationed, shaped into a justification.

The poem’s real target is the comfort of spectatorship. "In killing there is more than commentary" is a sneer at the idea that you can stand safely outside events and still claim moral authority. Tate, a Southern modernist with an agrarian streak, wrote in a culture where honor-talk was both inheritance and alibi, and in a century where war industrialized the gap between principle and action. The quote reads like a confession and a rebuke: the world doesn’t always offer clean refusals, and it punishes those who confuse eloquence with agency.

"Rare chance" is the most chilling phrase. It frames killing not as constant brutality but as opportunism, the moment when circumstance hands you permission. Tate isn’t celebrating it; he’s exposing how quickly the language of ethics bends to the grammar of opportunity, and how adulthood can mean trading ideals for a steadier aim.