Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Motion

A chill runs under the line because it poses as reassurance while quietly admitting to sabotage. “These places” arrives first, tactile and public, then narrows to “the ancient things you know,” a phrase that feels both intimate and inherited: memory as landscape, tradition as personal property. Motion’s speaker isn’t simply observing that knowledge fades; he’s announcing agency over the fading. “You won’t know soon” reads like a threat delivered in the calm voice of someone making tea. The comma splice of place and “ancient things” blurs geography with culture, suggesting that what’s at stake isn’t just a location but the deep grammar of belonging.

The second sentence snaps the tone into something more sinisterly practical: “I’m working on it now.” No metaphors, no softening. It’s the language of administration, of project management, of a plan in motion. That banality is the point: erasure is rarely theatrical. It happens through paperwork, redevelopment, policy, neglect - the slow unknowing engineered by people who can afford to treat history as an inconvenience.

Subtextually, the “I” could be a lover weaponizing intimacy (“I know what matters to you, so I’ll unmake it”), but it also scans as a broader cultural voice: modernity speaking to the past with a smirk. Motion, a poet attuned to Englishness and its hauntings, often writes where personal memory meets national story. Here the line exposes how fragile “ancient” knowledge is when someone decides it’s expendable - and how violence can sound, at first, like a casual update.