Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Shapiro

A tomb that can "list and founder" is a brutal demotion: the architecture of remembrance reduced to a boat taking on water. Shapiro doesn’t give us the noble erosion of “ashes to ashes.” He gives us a grave that loses its bearings, tilting and sinking into the most ordinary landscape feature imaginable, “the troughs of grass.” The diction is nautical, but the setting is pastoral, and that clash is the point. Whatever grandeur the dead man imagined for himself, time will treat it like bad craftsmanship and bad weather.

“Lastly” is doing quiet work here. It implies a sequence of failures, a final step in a longer unraveling: reputation thinning, friends disappearing, heirs forgetting, the rituals of honor becoming procedural. The tomb is the last artifact standing, and even that doesn’t stand for long. Shapiro’s intent isn’t just to preach mortality; it’s to puncture the fantasy that a name can be made permanent by stone.

“And none shall speak his name” lands with biblical severity, but without biblical consolation. The line echoes the old fear of damnatio memoriae and the modern dread of being algorithmically irrelevant: not punished, just unsaid. In mid-century American poetry, Shapiro often trained a skeptical eye on public virtue and private vanity; here the subtext feels like a warning to anyone who confuses acclaim with endurance. Oblivion doesn’t arrive as a dramatic apocalypse. It arrives as maintenance deferred, as grass reclaiming its troughs, as a mouth that simply stops bothering to pronounce you.