Life & Wisdom Quote by Donald Justice

There is a chilling practicality to these lines: no uplift, no workaround, not even the courtesy of a consoling metaphor. Justice isn’t offering tragedy as spectacle; he’s rendering grief as logistics. “There is no way to ease the burden” lands like a verdict from someone who’s tried every remedy and found them ornamental. The sentence refuses adornment because the speaker refuses false hope.

Then comes the quietly epic “voyage,” a word that usually smuggles in adventure, agency, and a destination worth reaching. Justice flips it into a conveyor belt: “from harm to harm.” That repetition is the point. Pain isn’t a single event but a sequence, a system you move through. The line’s momentum mimics inevitability; you can almost feel the oar-stroke rhythm of continuing because continuing is what bodies do.

“A land of others and of silence” is where the poem turns social. The aftermath of harm is not just internal; it’s estrangement. “Others” suggests the living who can’t quite accompany you, whose ordinary speech becomes incomprehensible, even offensive. “Silence” isn’t peace; it’s the failure of language around trauma and mortality, the moment when community turns awkward, then absent.

Justice, a poet associated with formal control and emotional restraint, makes that restraint part of the meaning. The poem’s intent isn’t to dramatize suffering but to honor its unshowy persistence. The subtext: endurance is not heroic; it’s compulsory, and what it costs is belonging.