Sir Walter Raleigh on Sorrow and Hope
When circumstances appear dire and the course ahead is dark it can be very tempting to be lured deeper into the gloom. However, even in the deepest valleys it is important to keep one’s eyes fixed towards the uplands. I was reminded of this recently re-reading Philip Magnus’ excellent concise biography of Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), one of the most colourful adventurers of a highly spirited age. Raleigh’s life was filled with adventure and turmoil, where great dreams and personal joys could easily have been dampened by disappointment and disaster. He was entirely familiar with both the delights and the trials of the human condition. Yet in spite of all, he never let the turn of events weaken his attachment to the things most important to him nor dim his enthusiasm for life.
In 1597, Lord Robert Cecil, Secretary of State, was hit by disaster when his wife died. Raleigh wrote to Cecil to comfort him and advise him against letting the bitter feelings of sorrow consume him.
Sorrows are dangerous companions, converting bad into evil and evil into worse. The mind that entertaineth them is as the earth and dust whereon sorrows and adversities of the world do, as the beasts of the field, tread, trample, and defile…Sorrows draw not the dead to life, but the living to death.
It is very sound advice, as true today as it was over four hundred years ago. It is clear that, in this regard, Raleigh practised what he preached and never let calamities control his mind. Nearly two decades later, years after a political trial that can be described as highly dubious at best and an extreme injustice at worst, he faced his own imminent demise on the axeman’s block with similar resolve, subordinating his fears to an even greater hope. The night before he was executed he penned the following short verse:
Even such is time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who, in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust.