James Shirley’s poetic masterpiece, “The Glories Of Our Blood And State,” should be required reading, not only for serious students of literature, but for all those who — this coming undas --- may wish to contemplate the meaning of our brief existence.
As a memento mori (reminder of mortality), it is non pareil, jolting us from our complacency and telling us in language pithy and abundant with imagery and symbolism that death is inevitable, earthly achievements are transitory. and that only virtuous actions endure. Dying, it tells us, is the great equalizer: “Death lays its icy hands on kings/Sceptre and crown/Must tumble down/And in the dust be equal made/With the poor crooked scythe and spade.”
“All flesh is as grass, and all of the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away,” as we read in Isaiah 40:6-8 (KJV). Billionaire or beggar, it’s all the same: “When his breath departs, he returns to earth; on that very day his plans perish.” (Psalm 146:4, GNB).
The poem should also be drilled into the heads of the crooks in government, those high officials who cannot be content with their generous perks but still feel the need to rob the people of billions. These depraved knaves feel as if they are going to live forever to enjoy their filthy money, oblivious to the fable of the wealthy man in Luke who, admiring his riches, planned to indulge himself for the rest of his life, only for God to tell him: “Fool! Tonight, you die! And your riches, who gets them?”
My father, a most incorruptible politician, once told me that you can only eat so much, drink so much, wear so many clothes, live in one house, and ride in one car at a time, so what do you need wretched excess for? Don’t get me wrong; I do not abhor having wealth. The Bible says it is the LOVE of money, not money itself, that is the root of all evil. But what you have must be wealth earned by the sweat of your brow through honest labor. Proverbs 10:2-5 (NASB) teaches us that “ill-gotten gains do not profit, but righteousness delivers from death.”
And the end shall come sooner or later to this brief life: “The days of our years are threescore and ten,” it is written in Psalm 90:10 (GNB). Seventy years, more or less. What you do with them — good or bad --- is your choice alone.
How you will be remembered is also up to you. “A good name is better than great riches,” states Proverbs 22:1 (ESV). Indeed, the incumbent’s family is proof of that; some forty years after being ousted, the Marcos name — rightly or wrongly -– is still associated with massive plunder.
To once again reference the Good Book, the apostle Matthew asks in 16:26 (NEV), “(w)hat good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” All that dirty money accumulated by the thieves in government cannot save them from the judgment of history, or whatever other verdict, human or divine, may come their way. Those riches are naught but profits of doom.
As written in the ultimate lines of the poem mentioned above, “Only the actions of the just/Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.”