The verse invokes two symbols of wild abandon, the lion and the lizard. Together they suggest that all achievements of man are brought to ruin as were the two legendary heroes, Jamshyd the king, and Bahram the hunter. Nothing flourishes forever. Past glories and ancient honors are forgotten. Tombs decay and go unnoticed.
The poets note the two deaths and accept them as historic footnotes. They have been representative of the human condition even in the distant past. Based on this summary knowledge they seem to imply that the wisest of us will recognize that dealing death and receiving it, and that lauding without reservation and then loosing status are inevitable companions. Perhaps there is a leveling in our natures that makes such things inevitable. The wild returns.
Marcel Proust
French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style. Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.
Today he is widely recognised as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.
Quote from Remembrance of Things Past:
“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”