Campbell’s speaker notices a strange paradox of living: the longer we live, the shorter each stage appears. To a child, a day stretches like a year, but with age the years flash by. Youth is a smooth, lingering current along grassy banks, full of ease and pleasure. Then care and sorrow come, making cheeks wan and time seem to accelerate. The speaker asks the stars why life speeds up just as joy fades and death draws near. There is a quiet ache here, a sense of loss as friends depart one by one. Yet the final stanza refuses bitterness. Heaven, the speaker suggests, compensates for weakening strength by making time feel faster, while granting youth a leisurely sweetness precisely because it is so sweet. The mood is melancholy but also resigned and grateful—a bittersweet acceptance that life’s changing tempo is, in the end, a kind of mercy.
The River of Life — Summary
The more we live, more brief appear Our life's succeeding stages; A day to childhood seems a year, And years like passing ages.
The gladsome current of our youth, Ere passion yet disorders, Steals lingering like a river smooth Along its grassy borders.
But as the careworn cheek grows wan, And sorrow's shafts fly thicker, Ye stars, that measure life to man, Why seem your courses quicker?
When joys have lost their bloom and breath, And life itself is vapid, Why, as we reach the Falls of Death Feel we its tide more rapid?
It may be strange—yet who would change Time's course to slower speeding, When one by one our friends have gone, And left our bosoms bleeding?
Heaven gives our years of fading strength Indemnifying fleetness; And those of youth, a seeming length, Proportion'd to their sweetness.