Ewigkeit
Ewigkeit - meaning Summary
Memory Resists Oblivion
A speaker confronts the familiar Stoic claim that humans end as "food for worms" and refuses the nihilistic conclusion. Instead of accepting oblivion, the voice insists that what once mattered — personal craft, a remembered moon, an afternoon — endures in some enduring, burning form. The poem frames memory and valued losses as a kind of private eternity that resists rhetorical triumphs of death and empty glory.
Read Complete AnalysesI turn in my mouth the Castilian verse that says what always tends to be said since the Latin of Seneca: horrendous dictum that all we are is food for worms. Let the pale ashes return to chant the tales of death and of a victory for that rhetorical queen who steps on our standard banners, our empty glory. Not so. Whatsoever has blessed this hide I’m not going to deny like a coward. I know that one thing is not: oblivion. I know that in eternity it all lasts and burns—the much and the precious that I’ve lost: this forge of mine, that moon, this afternoon.
Translated from the Spanish by Evelyn Hooven
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