Life & Mortality Quote by Karl Shapiro

Shapiro’s line doesn’t ease you into mortality; it shoves your face into the “tight belly of the dead” and makes you stay there long enough to notice the workmanship. The verbs are imperatives - “Burrow,” “inlay” - as if the speaker is commissioning an artisan, not describing decomposition. That tonal mismatch is the engine: death becomes a kind of craft project, and the reader is implicated in the act of making it look right.

“Tight belly” is viscera rendered domestic, almost womb-like, a blunt reminder that the body’s most intimate enclosure is also where nature’s cleanup crew gets to work. Then comes the brutal elegance: “inlay maggots like a jewel.” Inlay is what you do with gold leaf, mother-of-pearl, painstaking ornament. Shapiro forces a collision between aesthetic language and bodily horror, daring the lyric tradition - which loves roses and relics - to admit what’s actually under the skin. The maggots aren’t just there; they’re set, placed, curated.

Context matters: Shapiro was a World War II-era poet whose work often wrestled with modernity’s appetite for damage and the uneasy distance between civilized surfaces and savage facts. The line reads like a protest against sanitized remembrance and noble death. It’s not only memento mori; it’s memento mundi: a reminder that the world’s beauty is inseparable from its rot, and that “jewels” can be a trick of framing.