"Lastly, his tomb shall list and founder in the troughs of grass. And none shall speak his name"

Karl Shapiro’s words conjure the quiet burial of memory and legacy beneath the indifferent weight of time. The image of a tomb listing and foundering in the "troughs of grass" evokes the neglect that comes not abruptly but through gradual surrender. Grass, a symbol of the natural world’s relentless cycles, overtakes the man-made structure meant to immortalize a name, suggesting that nothing constructed by human ambition or memory escapes nature’s embrace. Foundations buckle not through violence but through a slow, almost tender abandonment, as if the earth gently reclaims what was once set apart by ceremony and stone.

The anonymity implicit in “none shall speak his name” doubles the silence of the physical scene. It is not only the decay of monuments but also the erasure of story, reputation, the essential identity that binds a man to the collective consciousness. Speaking a name is a small, persistent act of remembrance, a counter to oblivion, and Shapiro imagines a future where even this humble invocation is lost. Oblivion here is not dramatic, but inexorable. The grass grows, seasons change, lives and voices pass, gradually stripping all significance from what was once a life worthy of a tomb and a spoken name.

Shapiro’s vision is not wholly despairing; there is a certain dignity and equality in the leveling power of nature and silence. The tomb’s collapse is not punitive, but natural, a return rather than an exile. The poem gestures toward the humility of all human endeavor, reminding the living that no matter the grandeur of legacy, time and the indifferent continuity of nature will bring everything, and everyone, to rest in the same hushed green anonymity. The name, once carefully set apart, fades gently into the world’s vast unfolding, enacting both loss and a strange, serene completion.