Francisco de Quevedo: Metaphysical Poems, 2

Written By Ryan Wilson

Ryan Wilson (translator)

“Ah, my own life!”. . . What? Does no one reply?
Bring back the yesteryears that my life’s known!
Fortuna’s gnawed my time down to the bone;
My madness hides the Hours passing by. 

  I can know neither how nor where they’ve fled,
My health and youth have proven fugitive!
Except that life I’ve lived, I do not live,
And there’s no grief not circling round my head. 

  Yesterday’s gone; tomorrow’s not yet come;
Not stopping anywhere, today is fleeing;
I am a was, a will be, and a weary being. 

  In present, past, and future, I alone
Join diapers with the shroud, and I’ve become
Present successions of a man who’s gone. 

Ryan Wilson

Ryan Wilson was born in Griffin, Georgia, in 1982, and raised in nearby Macon. His books include The Stranger World (Measure, 2017), winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, How to Think Like a Poet (Wiseblood, 2019), and Proteus Bound: Selected Translations 2008-20 (Franciscan UP, 2021). His work appears widely in periodicals such as Best American Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, First Things, Five Points, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, The Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review. Co-editor of the anthology, Contemporary Catholic Poetry (Paraclete, 2022), he is Editor-in-Chief of Literary Matters, and he teaches at The Catholic University of America and in the M.F.A. program at the University of St. Thomas—Houston.

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