Time & Perspective Quote by Abraham Cowley

Cowley’s line doesn’t soothe; it corrects. “Nothing is to come, and nothing past” is a blunt demolition of the everyday story we tell ourselves - that life is a neat timeline with a meaningful arc. He replaces it with “an eternal now,” a phrase that sounds mystical but lands like a discipline: stop bargaining with the future, stop laundering the past, because both are narrative conveniences. What “does always last” isn’t memory or destiny but the only unit of existence you can’t outsource.

The craft is in the paradox. “Eternal” and “now” pull in opposite directions, and Cowley binds them into a single pressure point. The meter moves with a grave, almost ceremonial steadiness; that calm surface makes the claim feel less like a provocation than a law. Even the symmetrical negatives (“nothing... nothing...”) act like a rhetorical bracket, fencing the reader into the present.

Context matters. Cowley wrote in a 17th-century England rattled by civil war, regicide, exile, and restoration - an era when history was not a backdrop but a weapon, and the future was a gamble. In that climate, “eternal now” reads as both philosophical refuge and political fatigue: when public time becomes unstable, private time gets reimagined as the only stable ground. The subtext is survival by attention. If the world keeps rewriting yesterday and threatening tomorrow, the present becomes the one place you can still claim as real.