Archibald MacLeish on a dying world

That we are at the end of an era is not something that can be proved scientifically. One senses it or one does not. One knows by intuition that the old images, as Archibald MacLeish [pictured right] says in The Metaphor, have lost their meaning.

A world ends when its metaphor has died.

An age becomes an age, all else beside,
When sensuous poets in their pride invent
Emblems for the soul's consent
That speak the meanings men will never know
But man-imagined images can show:
It perishes when those images, though seen,
No longer mean.

[From The Metaphor by Archibald MacLeish, courtesy of Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. v.]