Life & Mortality Quote by Alexander Smith

Grief has a dark punchline: the only people who know the whole story are the ones who can no longer tell it. Smith’s line turns death into a kind of airtight archive, a final privacy policy no living interrogation can breach. “The dead keep their secrets” isn’t just spooky; it’s a rebuke to the living habit of trying to extract neat meanings from messy lives - to pin down motives, assign blame, recover the definitive version.

The second half is where the blade twists. “In a while we shall be as wise as they” sounds like consolation until you catch the condition: that wisdom arrives only with the same silence. Smith makes “wise” and “taciturn” mirror each other, implying that the ultimate knowledge is inert, unusable. It’s an anti-enlightenment joke: what good is omniscience if it comes bundled with muteness? The line also satirizes the survivor’s fantasy that time will clarify everything. Time doesn’t clarify; it closes the file.

Context matters. Smith, a mid-Victorian poet writing in an era obsessed with mourning rituals, moral biography, and the afterlife, slips a skeptical note under the lace. Victorian culture loved to talk to and about the dead; Smith reminds you the conversation is one-sided. The subtext isn’t nihilism so much as discipline: accept the limits of testimony, the gaps in memory, the parts of a person that were never meant to be public. Even the living, he suggests, are only temporarily talkative.