Life & Wisdom Quote by Edmund Waller

Waller’s couplet glides in on a neat piece of weather-wisdom and then quietly snaps shut like a moral trap. The image is simple enough to feel inevitable: wind stops, seas settle. But the real intent is more political and social than pastoral. A 17th-century poet writing through civil war, regicide, Restoration, and shifting loyalties doesn’t pick “calm” innocently. Calm is the advertised virtue of a courtly world that prizes composure, obedience, and the appearance of stability. Passions, by contrast, are not romantic fireworks; they’re the dangerous stuff of faction, zeal, and public disorder.

The subtext is a cautionary bargain: serenity arrives only when the force that animates you has been exhausted or silenced. Waller’s “when passions are no more” isn’t “when we manage our feelings” but when we’ve outlived them, disciplined them, or had them stripped away by experience. It’s a vision of peace that feels eerily like numbness. The line flatters restraint while hinting at its cost.

Form does half the work. The couplet’s balanced syntax and end-stopped certainty perform the calm they praise; even the semicolon is a hinge from nature to human nature, implying the transfer is seamless. “Give o’er” carries a faint suggestion of surrender, making the quiet sound less like harmony than capitulation. In an age obsessed with temperance, order, and the taming of extremes, Waller turns meteorology into a code of conduct: tranquility is real, but it may be what’s left after desire has been weathered down to nothing.