Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Motion

A poet “scenting the air” is a lovely idea until you notice what he’s actually inhaling: despair that’s become a “by-word,” a lazy shorthand everyone reaches for. Andrew Motion’s line turns the romantic trope of the sensitive observer into something closer to a grim survival tactic. He hasn’t stopped reading the atmosphere; he’s just had to switch methods, as if the old equipment for hope no longer works.

The phrase “different way” is doing quiet, devastating work. It implies a before-and-after: a world where scanning the air for meaning once felt elective, even pleasurable, and a world where it’s been forced into recalibration. “Scent” is intimate and animal, less like analysis than instinct. Motion suggests despair isn’t merely an emotion; it’s environmental, particulate, something you pick up without consent. That shift matters culturally because it captures how dread becomes ambient in certain eras - not always loud, often normalized.

Then comes the sting: “already it’s a by-word.” “Already” compresses time, hinting at how quickly language corrodes when a crisis repeats long enough to become familiar. A “by-word” is what you say when you don’t want to say more. Motion’s subtext is a critique of that linguistic fatigue: despair gets routinized, traded as a token of sophistication or realism. The line reads like a private note from someone watching bleakness go mainstream - not as a dramatic catastrophe, but as a slogan people can wear.