Life & Mortality Quote by Karl Shapiro

Shapiro yokes comedy to catastrophe with the kind of unsentimental clarity that feels earned rather than performative. "Laughter and grief join hands" isn’t a comforting paradox; it’s an image of forced proximity, like two strangers shoved together in a crowded lifeboat. The line implies that emotional categories we treat as opposites are, in lived time, conspirators. You laugh because you can’t hold the weight any other way. You grieve with the same body that a minute ago shook with jokes.

The poem turns quickly from that abstract coupling to anatomy: the heart "clumps" with a "heavy stride". That verb choice is deliberately ugly. It denies the romantic, fluttering heart of lyric tradition and replaces it with a blunt, physical organ doing labor. Even the face becomes a document: "lined and wrinkled like a chart". Experience is mapped onto skin, and the map isn’t a souvenir; it’s evidence. The bloodshot eyes complete the picture, tears reframed as a tide - not a private moment but a recurring, almost planetary force.

"Let the wind blow" reads like a fatalist’s permission slip. The world will keep moving, indifferent and continuous, while "many a man shall die". Coming from a 20th-century American poet who lived through war and its aftershocks, the subtext is collective: mortality isn’t a singular tragedy but a steady weather system. The intent isn’t to console. It’s to strip sentimentality down to bodily fact and make endurance sound like what it is: heavy, rhythmic, unglamorous.