From Tennyson's poem "Tithonus"
As the board's resident literature professor, I feel it's my duty to offer this thought for the day, which has a definite "Boys of Summer" quality, remembering past youth and meditating on the inevitability of aging and the experience of living beyond your moment:
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
The line "After many a summer dies the swan" was also used by Aldous Huxley (you remember, "Brave New World") as the title of one of his novels.
[And now back to our regularly scheduled programming--]
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