Life & Mortality Quote by W. S. Merwin

A life’s worth of mentors wiped clean in eight words, leaving a final instructor you can’t argue with. Merwin’s line lands because it refuses consolation: it doesn’t romanticize age or turn grief into wisdom content. It’s a tally, almost bureaucratic in its bluntness, and that cool surface is exactly what lets the feeling hit hard.

“Teachers” can be read literally, but the subtext widens fast. In Merwin’s world, instruction isn’t just classrooms; it’s the living web of voices that shape a mind - friends, elders, writers, lovers, landscapes, languages. To say they’re “dead” is to name the slow collapse of reference points. The only remaining guide is “silence,” which works two ways at once: as the hush left by absence, and as a discipline. Silence becomes an authority, a presence that teaches by withholding. It offers no syllabus, no reassurance, just the demand that you listen differently.

Context matters: Merwin’s poetry is steeped in erasure and attentiveness - environmental loss, spiritual searching (including his engagement with Buddhism), and a late style that strips away punctuation like a moral choice. The line also echoes his obsession with what language can’t keep. If words are tools for carrying the dead forward, silence is the moment you realize the tools are finite.

The sting is that “except” doesn’t soften anything. It narrows the room. What’s left isn’t peace; it’s the stark curriculum of listening after everyone who taught you how to hear is gone.