Life & Mortality Quote by Henry Van Dyke

The line lands like a polite theft notice: everything you’ve spent your life collecting is already spoken for. Van Dyke’s trick is to make mortality sound less like a tragedy than a clerical correction. “What you possess” is framed as a temporary clerical error that death will resolve by reassignment. The phrasing strips ownership of its romance and exposes it as paperwork: at the “day of your death,” your prized objects don’t even get a eulogy, just a new name on the label.

The counterweight - “But what you are” - swaps economics for identity, and that’s the real persuasion. Van Dyke isn’t merely urging modesty; he’s relocating the reader’s ambition. The subtext is a critique of Gilded Age material confidence: an America learning to measure success in property and status, told by a minister-poet that the only durable asset is character. He uses the language of possession against itself. You can “possess” a house, but you can’t possess yourself in the same way; you can only become. That shift from having to being turns a moral instruction into a psychological one: invest in the self you’ll still “own” when the estate sale begins.

As a poet, Van Dyke keeps it blunt, almost proverb-like, so it can travel. The sentence is built to be remembered at exactly the moment its warning becomes undeniable - when the world, efficiently and without malice, starts dividing up your things.