A. E. Housman’s “On the idle hill of summer” is among the most compressed and devastating poems in A Shropshire Lad, the 1896 collection that made its author a defining voice of English elegiac poetry. Its surface is deceptively simple: a speaker rests on a summer hill, hears military sounds in the distance, imagines soldiers moving along the roads, recalls the dead of earlier wars, and finally seems to respond to the summons himself. Yet within this brief dramatic movement Housman gathers an extraordinary range of feeling: pastoral stillness, historical memory, pity for youth, disgust at war’s material cruelty, fascination with martial spectacle, and an almost unbearable recognition that those who understand the fatal consequences of war may nevertheless be drawn toward it. The poem does not merely condemn conflict from a position of safety. It places its speaker at the unsettling point where knowledge and desire meet, where the imagination knows that marching men are “all to die” and yet hears the bugles as a call to rise.

The poem belongs unmistakably to A Shropshire Lad, Housman’s imagined Shropshire sequence of rural landscapes, young men, loss, and premature death. Although Housman had personal associations with the English Midlands, the Shropshire of the poems is not principally a documentary county. It is a poetic territory: recognizably English in its hills, roads, fields, villages, and seasonal changes, but also shaped by classical reserve, ballad-like directness, and an intense consciousness of mortality. In this landscape, the beauty of the countryside never becomes merely consoling. Green fields and flowing streams are shadowed by graves, executions, departures, and the knowledge that youth is transient. “On the idle hill of summer” exemplifies this characteristic Housmanian doubleness. Its summer scene initially appears languid, fertile, and peaceful, yet the very leisure of the opening is disturbed by a sound that carries the pressure of military obligation and death.

Published at the end of the Victorian era, the collection emerged during a period in which British culture retained powerful ideals of imperial service, masculine courage, public duty, and military glory. The British Empire was at its height, and war was often represented in popular culture as a proving ground for young men, an arena of honor, comradeship, and patriotic self-sacrifice. Housman’s poem recognizes the allure of such ideas—the scarlet uniforms, the stirring instruments, the communal movement of marching files—but refuses their sentimental consolation. Its soldiers are not preserved in the rhetoric of honor. They are “dear to friends and food for powder”: beloved persons on the one hand, expendable bodies on the other. The brutal abruptness of that phrase punctures the language of public ceremony. To governments and armies, the men may become units of military use; to their friends and families, they remain irreducible objects of love.

That unsparing perspective is especially notable because the poem predates the First World War, the conflict through which many readers later came to understand it. Housman did not write from the trenches, and he did not possess the specific historical knowledge that would shape the work of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, or Edward Thomas. Nevertheless, the poem anticipates a central concern of twentieth-century war poetry: the discrepancy between the visual pageantry of military mobilization and the bodily reality of death. Its prophecy that those who march will not return seems chilling after the mass casualties of the Boer War and, more profoundly, the First World War. Housman’s readers in the early twentieth century often found in A Shropshire Lad language for grief that had not originally been written for that catastrophe. The collection’s young dead, its vanished companions, and its roads leading away from home became newly and painfully relevant to a generation confronted with unprecedented loss.

The opening image establishes a pastoral scene marked by apparent inaction. The “idle hill of summer” suggests a place untouched by urgency. “Idle” does not mean worthless here; rather, it conveys repose, freedom from labor, and a dreamy suspension of ordinary demands. The hill seems almost personified in its idleness, as if the landscape itself were resting under the warmth of the season. The speaker, “sleepy with the flow of streams,” is similarly absorbed into this atmosphere of natural languor. Housman’s phrase does more than describe a pleasant rural sound. The streams induce a half-conscious state in which the boundary between external reality and inward apprehension becomes unstable. The speaker hears the drum “like a noise in dreams,” an apt comparison because dreams can make distant impressions feel both unreal and inescapable. The military sound is at once far away and psychologically immediate.

This dreamlike quality is crucial to the poem’s emotional architecture. The speaker does not encounter soldiers directly at first; he hears them across a distance. Sound crosses the pastoral landscape before bodies do. The “steady drummer” is both a literal military musician and an emblem of mechanical persistence. The repeated word “drumming” mimics the recurrence of the beat, while its association with “dreams” makes the sound seem to arise from the mind’s own feared knowledge. The drum is not an isolated interruption but a pulse that gradually takes possession of the scene. In a poem so deeply concerned with inevitability, the drum becomes an auditory figure for the onward movement of time, history, and mortality. It is regular, impersonal, and difficult to resist. The sleepy observer may be still, but the military world is already moving toward him.

Housman intensifies this movement through his handling of space. “Far” recurs insistently, but distance does not offer safety. The poem moves from “far” to “far and near,” and then outward across “the roads of earth.” The military procession seems to extend beyond a local English route into a larger human geography. “Roads of earth” is a resonant phrase: it can mean the roads across the world, but it also reminds readers that roads lie upon earth, the substance to which human bodies return. The soldiers travel over the ground that will ultimately receive them. Housman thus transforms ordinary landscape into an elegiac medium. Roads lead not simply from village to town or from home to battle; they lead through life toward death. The motion of the troops is geographical, historical, and existential at once.

The phrase “dear to friends and food for powder” gives the poem one of its sharpest moral shocks. Housman juxtaposes intimate affection with military utility, and the contrast depends on the economy of his diction. “Dear” is an emotionally warm word, almost domestic in its tenderness. It evokes mothers, lovers, siblings, companions, and the private bonds that make a particular young man precious. “Food for powder,” by contrast, converts the human body into matter consumed by weaponry. The expression draws on an older idiom for cannon fodder, but Housman’s version is especially harsh because “food” normally implies nourishment and life. Here the soldier’s flesh is imagined as fuel for destruction. War consumes what friendship loves. The phrase has the force of an ethical indictment precisely because it does not pause to moralize. Its plainness leaves the reader to feel the obscenity of the reduction.

The poem’s third movement turns from the anticipated deaths of the marching soldiers to the remains of those already killed. “Fields forgotten” are haunted not by monuments, heroic names, or national ceremonies, but by bleaching bones. Housman’s vision is anti-monumental. The dead are not securely held in public memory; their battlefields themselves have been forgotten. Nature continues its processes of weathering and decomposition, indifferent to national narratives of victory or sacrifice. The word “bleach” is particularly powerful because it makes sunlight, usually a sign of vitality in pastoral poetry, an agent in the exposure and whitening of bones. Summer’s brightness does not redeem death. It reveals it.

“Lovely lads and dead and rotten” is perhaps the poem’s most uncompromising collision of beauty and decay. The phrase begins with an affectionate valuation of youth: these are “lovely lads,” not abstractions such as warriors, patriots, or casualties. “Lads” evokes their youthfulness and their social ordinariness, while “lovely” preserves the speaker’s emotional responsiveness to them. Housman’s poetry repeatedly mourns young male beauty, strength, and possibility, often with a tenderness that has invited biographical attention. As a man whose deepest attachments were directed toward other men, and whose emotional life was marked by privacy and disappointment, Housman gave unusual intensity to the image of the beautiful young man lost before his time. It would be reductive to treat the poem as personal confession, but its attention to “lovely lads” cannot be separated from the broader Housmanian pattern in which male youth appears as an object of admiration, desire, fellowship, and grief.

The apposition of “lovely” with “dead and rotten” refuses to allow beauty to remain idealized. In many traditions of elegy, death may preserve the young person’s beauty in memory; Housman instead confronts physical corruption. This is not sensationalism. It is an insistence that the rhetoric of noble sacrifice often depends on looking away from what death does to bodies. The poem forces together the image of the marching young soldier in bright uniform and the image of his eventual decay in an abandoned field. Such a contrast anticipates the visual and moral strategies of later war poets, although Housman’s manner remains notably condensed. Owen, for example, often makes the reader witness the immediate violence inflicted on the body; Housman imagines the long aftermath, when battle has passed from public attention and only bones remain. His horror is temporal as much as physical: the horror of being forgotten.

The declaration that “None that go return again” has a deliberately absolute force. On one level, it is a recognition of military death: those who go to war may never come home. Yet its stark universality exceeds literal prediction. Not every soldier in any actual campaign dies, but the poem speaks from an elegiac consciousness in which departure itself is irreversible. Even survivors do not truly return unchanged. The person who leaves home for war crosses a threshold; experience, suffering, and the passage of time prevent a simple restoration of the earlier self. The statement also resonates with Housman’s persistent preoccupation with the irretrievability of youth. In A Shropshire Lad, people repeatedly depart from the familiar world of fields and villages, and whether they die, emigrate, are imprisoned, or merely grow older, the past cannot be recovered. The poem’s military journey therefore becomes a concentrated version of life’s one-way movement.

The final stanza is remarkable because it does not resolve the poem into detached pacifism. The bugles “hollo,” the fife “scream[s],” and the “files of scarlet” move forward with brightness and energy. Housman’s verbs are carefully chosen. “Hollo” is a rough, open, almost archaic word for calling aloud; “screaming” gives the fife a more piercing, even distressed voice. These are not entirely harmonious sounds. The instruments command attention, but their urgency contains an undertone of alarm. Scarlet, too, is double-edged. It is the color of historic British military uniforms and therefore carries associations of ceremony, visibility, pride, and imperial display. At the same time, scarlet inevitably suggests blood. The soldiers appear “gay,” a word that in Housman’s period commonly meant cheerful, bright, or festive, but the adjective becomes bitterly ironic in a poem that has already shown their likely fate. The procession is beautiful, animated, and doomed.

The speaker’s concluding assertion, “Woman bore me, I will rise,” is among Housman’s most enigmatic and moving gestures. It seems at first to embrace the martial call. Having heard the bugles, the speaker declares that he too will rise and join the marching ranks. Yet the sentence is not a simple patriotic flourish. By saying “Woman bore me,” he identifies himself not through nation, regiment, ideology, or martial inheritance, but through birth. He is the son of a woman; he is a mortal body brought into the world through maternal labor. The phrase restores to the potential soldier the human vulnerability that military language suppresses. It may also imply a fatalistic logic: because he was born, he must die; because he is alive and male in a culture that calls young men to arms, he feels compelled to answer. Birth itself becomes the origin of obligation, and the summons to war becomes entangled with the universal summons to mortality.

There is a tonal complexity in “I will rise” that rewards close attention. The verb can mean getting up from the hill, responding physically to the call. It can carry a conventional sense of courage or resolution. It may also bear an ominous, almost resurrectional echo: the speaker will rise only to enter the cycle that leads toward death and, perhaps, toward the earth from which the dead might imaginatively rise. Housman offers no clear assurance of transcendence. His poetry is often skeptical of religious consolation, even while it borrows the emotional and verbal gravity of biblical and liturgical language. “Rise” therefore hovers between heroic action and fatal submission. The speaker’s choice is moving because it is not based on ignorance. He rises after imagining the forgotten bones. The poem understands that human beings can be drawn toward structures—war, duty, masculine solidarity, national spectacle—that they know are destructive.

This psychological truth distinguishes the poem from a merely didactic antiwar statement. Housman does not portray the speaker as morally superior because he sees through martial glamour, nor does he portray him as foolish because he responds to it. Instead, the poem exposes the force of collective ritual. Drums, bugles, fifes, uniforms, marching files, and the visual order of military display create a powerful aesthetic experience. War recruits the senses before it recruits the body. The listener on the hill is susceptible not because he lacks compassion—indeed, he feels the soldiers’ deaths intensely—but because martial music and movement promise participation in something larger than the isolated self. The poem’s tragic insight is that beauty can be mobilized in the service of death. The same sensitivity that appreciates summer streams and lovely youths can be captivated by scarlet ranks and calling bugles.

Housman’s classical learning gives additional depth to this treatment of war and mortality. Professionally, he was one of the great classical scholars of his age, renowned for exacting work on Latin texts. His poetry often appears simple because it avoids scholarly display, but its economy and fatalism owe much to ancient lyric and elegiac traditions. Classical poetry frequently joins beauty with brevity, youth with death, and the pleasures of the present with the certainty of loss. Housman’s pastoral landscape likewise recalls the ancient convention in which rural scenes are never wholly separate from political violence or historical change. Yet his English hills are not decorative imitations of Greece or Rome. He naturalizes classical elegy within a modern rural idiom. The forgotten bones in fields, the march along earthly roads, and the speaker’s consciousness of inevitable death all suggest a world in which human glory is temporary and nature outlasts the claims of states.

The poem’s language is also distinguished by its tension between plain speech and heightened compression. Housman rarely explains more than he needs to explain. He relies instead on collision: sleepy streams against drums, friendship against powder, loveliness against rot, gay scarlet against death. These juxtapositions produce much of the poem’s emotional intensity. The gentler words—“summer,” “sleepy,” “dear,” “lovely,” “woman”—are repeatedly invaded by harsher terms—“powder,” “slain,” “rotten,” “screaming.” Even the poem’s sounds participate in this contrast. The liquid softness associated with streams and sleep gives way to the percussive force of drumming and the sharp cries of military instruments. The result is a poem that makes readers feel peace under pressure. Its pastoral beauty is not destroyed at once; rather, it becomes the medium through which destruction is apprehended more painfully.

In cultural terms, the poem challenges the sentimental separation of home from war. The soldiers are initially heard from a hill in summertime, not from a battlefield. Their deaths are imagined in relation to friends, mothers, and familiar landscapes. Housman insists that war is not an event occurring somewhere else to anonymous military bodies. It begins in the sound that reaches the countryside, in the young man who gets up from the grass, in the family bond encoded in “Woman bore me.” This emphasis helps explain why the poem has retained such emotional power. It does not depend on detailed military history or on a particular named conflict. Rather, it dramatizes the recurring human pattern by which societies send cherished young people away under signs of pageantry and necessity, then permit time to erase the particularities of their deaths.

Its relevance has therefore extended well beyond the late-Victorian world in which it was written. Readers in the aftermath of global wars have heard in it an anticipation of mechanized slaughter; readers in later periods have recognized its suspicion of patriotic spectacle and its grief for lives converted into statistics. Yet the poem remains more than an accusation against political institutions. It is a meditation on the human condition in its widest sense. To be born is to enter time; to enter time is to be vulnerable to loss; to love others is to know that they can be taken away or forgotten. War makes this truth especially brutal, but Housman’s language suggests that death’s reach is broader than war alone. The drum’s steady beat resembles the persistent forward motion of life itself.

What makes “On the idle hill of summer” so memorable is the way it preserves emotional contradiction without dissolving it. The poem neither glorifies war nor pretends that martial appeal is negligible. It neither offers religious certainty nor reduces human action to meaningless despair. It gives us a speaker who hears the deathward march, knows the fate of the “lovely lads,” and still rises. That final act may be courageous, conditioned, tragic, or all three at once. Housman leaves the reader within that ambiguity, where poetry is often most truthful. His achievement is to make a summer hill contain an entire philosophy of transience: beauty is real, affection is real, music is real, and death is real; none cancels the others. The poem’s austere music and piercing tenderness transform this recognition into an experience of lasting resonance, reminding us why lyric poetry remains uniquely able to make private feeling, historical violence, and universal mortality speak in the same breath.

Robert Herrick’s “The Maypole” is a compact yet resonant poetic artifact that, like many of the verses in his 1648 collection Hesperides, encapsulates the rich interplay between festivity, social harmony, and the cyclical rhythms of rural life in early modern England. While the poem appears deceptively simple—a toast delivered in the midst of a May Day celebration—its brevity belies a deeper meditation on community, ritual, and the poet’s role as both celebrant and intermediary between the earthly and the ideal. To read “The Maypole” is to step into a moment suspended between time and eternity: the ephemeral garlands of spring are made immortal through poetic invocation, and the poet’s voice becomes the conduit through which joy is both expressed and sanctified. In this essay, we shall examine the poem’s historical and cultural embeddedness, its strategic employment of literary devices, its thematic preoccupations, and its emotional texture. We will also consider Herrick’s biographical disposition toward such rituals, situate the poem within the broader tradition of English pastoral and lyric poetry, and explore how the poem’s modest frame accommodates surprisingly expansive philosophical and anthropological resonances.

At its core, “The Maypole” is inseparable from the cultural institution of May Day, a celebration that, by Herrick’s time, had already accrued layers of mythic, folkloric, and ecclesiastical meanings. Originating in pre-Christian agrarian rites—most likely Roman Floralia or even older Germanic spring festivals—the May Day observance had evolved into one of England’s most beloved communal rituals by the sixteenth and sevent seventeenth centuries. The raising of the maypole, around which villagers danced, sang, and crowned a “May Queen,” was not merely diversion; it was a symbolic reenactment of cosmic renewal, fertility, and social cohesion. The poles themselves, often towering structures stripped of bark and bedecked with ribbons and flowers, stood as vertical axes connecting earth and sky, the mundane and the sacred. Herrick’s poem directly engages this tradition, not by describing the spectacle, but by voicing a ritualistic toast that both participates in and elevates the occasion.

Crucially, Herrick does not merely observe; he intervenes. The poem opens with an assertive, almost commanding declaration: “The May-pole is up.” This is not passive description but performative utterance—an act that acknowledges and thereby completes the ceremonial moment. The pole’s erection marks the threshold beyond which celebration may commence, and Herrick immediately responds by requesting the cup: “Now give me the cup.” This sequence—pole, then cup—suggests the dual nature of the May Day rite: public spectacle coupled with private (or semi-private) libation. The cup becomes a vessel not only of wine but of communal blessing. Herrick’s invocation is thus both personal and collective; he drinks, yes, but his drinking is an act of consecration directed toward others—first the anonymous artisans who wove the garlands, then the young women whose futures he blesses.

This movement from craft to kinship is significant. The poem’s first stanza honors labor—the “hands” that “compose / The glory of flowers”—thereby embedding aesthetic creation in the fabric of communal life. In early modern England, floral garlands were not decorations in the modern decorative sense; they were meaningful assemblages that carried symbolic weight. Specific flowers conveyed messages: rosemary for remembrance, hawthorn for hope, primroses for youth. To “compose” such garlands was to curate a language of flora, aligning natural beauty with human intention. Herrick’s praise of these anonymous makers underscores his humanist appreciation for the dignity of creative labor, even when modest and unheralded. The phrase “glory of flowers” is especially telling—it echoes biblical diction (“Consider the lilies…”) while also invoking the Baroque sensibility for transient beauty made radiant through art.

Transitioning to the second stanza, Herrick shifts focus to a more intimate, yet still public, sphere: the futures of the young women in the community. “A health to my girls,” he exclaims—note the possessive “my,” which reveals the poet’s affectionate, perhaps paternal, stance. He is not an outsider reporting on customs; he is a participant invested in the well-being of his neighbors. His toast wishes them husbands of high station—“earls / Or lords”—but this is less an expression of social climbing than a conventional poetic hyperbole rooted in the genre of the epithalamium, the wedding poem. Such wishes for aristocratic matches were standard in celebratory verse, functioning as symbolic shorthand for fortune, honor, and stability rather than literal aspirations. The real heart of the blessing lies in the latter half of the stanza: “And when that ye wed / To the bridal bed, / Then multiply all, like to fishes.”

Here, Herrick deploys one of the most ancient and cross-culturally resonant metaphors for fertility: multiplication like fish. The allusion to Genesis—“Be fruitful and multiply”—is unmistakable, yet it is rendered with a gentle, almost playful warmth. The comparison to fish, creatures of abundance that teem in rivers and seas, evokes natural fecundity without moralizing. This benediction, coming on May Day—a festival deeply tied to agricultural and human fertility—ties the personal destinies of the young women to the larger cycles of life that the season celebrates. Herrick thus collapses the microcosm of individual marriage into the macrocosm of seasonal regeneration. In doing so, he reaffirms the May Day ethos: that human continuity is inseparable from natural order.

Herrick’s poetic technique in “The Maypole” is deceptively artless, yet deeply controlled. He employs apostrophe throughout—addressing absent or generalized figures (“those / Whose hands…”, “my girls”)—which creates a sense of immediacy and presence. Though the audience is not physically described, their implied existence animates the poem. This rhetorical strategy is typical of Herrick, who often writes as if in conversation with his community, whether real or imagined. The tone is genial, warm, and inclusive, but it is also authoritative: the poet speaks not as an equal among revelers but as a kind of secular priest, licensed by verse to bestow blessings.

Repetition and incremental progression also shape the poem’s emotional cadence. The structure moves from object (the pole) to human agents (the garland-makers) to future subjects (the girls), each step expanding the circle of concern. The repeated use of the imperative—“give me,” “drink,” “multiply”—lends the poem a liturgical quality, as if it were a rite scripted in miniature. This incantatory rhythm reinforces the ceremonial context, suggesting that poetry itself can function as ritual speech, capable of invoking not only presence but possibility.

Imagery, though sparse, is potent. The “garlands around it” and the “glory of flowers” are not merely visual; they carry olfactory and tactile dimensions, evoking the scent of crushed petals and the texture of woven greenery. Such synesthetic details root the poem in sensory experience, countering any tendency toward abstraction. Similarly, the “bridal bed” is not a euphemism but a charged symbol, representing both consummation and continuity. Herrick avoids the overt eroticism present in some of his other poems (such as “Corinna’s Going A-Maying”), but the undercurrent of fecundity is unmistakable—appropriate, given the festival’s roots in fertility rites.

Biographically, Herrick’s affinity for such rituals reflects both his temperament and his circumstances. Ordained as a clergyman in the Church of England, he served as vicar of Dean Prior in Devon from 1629 until his ejection during the Puritan ascendancy in 1647—a period that coincided with the suppression of many traditional festivals, including May Day. The Puritans, viewing such customs as pagan and licentious, actively dismantled maypoles and outlawed revels. Herrick’s poetry, then, can be read as an act of cultural preservation—a lyrical archive of a vanishing world. “The Maypole,” written during or shortly before this turbulent era, becomes more than a festive toast; it is a quiet act of resistance against the erasure of communal joy. In this light, Herrick’s insistence on drinking “to the garlands” and blessing “my girls” takes on added poignancy: it is not merely celebration, but commemoration.

Comparatively, “The Maypole” shares affinities with the broader English pastoral tradition, particularly as practiced by Edmund Spenser and later by the Cavalier poets. Like Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, Herrick’s poem embeds seasonal ritual within a larger moral and social framework. Yet where Spenser often moralizes or allegorizes, Herrick remains resolutely local and immediate. His pastoral is not an idealized Arcadia but a lived English village, complete with its customs and kinship networks. Among the Cavaliers—poets such as Thomas Carew and Richard Lovelace—Herrick stands out for his attention to rural rather than courtly life. While Lovelace writes of “stone walls” and political exile, Herrick writes of garlands and bridal beds with equal conviction, suggesting that the dignity of the everyday is as worthy of verse as the drama of war or court.

Philosophically, “The Maypole” participates in what the anthropologist Victor Turner would later term “communitas”—moments of heightened social equality and emotional fusion that dissolve ordinary hierarchies. May Day, with its inversion of roles (e.g., mock kings and queens), temporary suspension of labor, and collective joy, exemplifies such liminal spaces. Herrick’s poem captures this liminality not by describing it, but by enacting it through voice. The poet, though a figure of some status, speaks as one among many, his blessings offered not from above but from within the circle of community. This democratic ethos—rooted in shared ritual rather than doctrine—is central to the poem’s emotional resonance.

Moreover, the poem subtly confronts the tension between transience and permanence. The garlands will wither, the maypole may be cut down, the girls will age—but the poem itself endures. In this, Herrick aligns with the classical carpe diem tradition, yet he diverges by emphasizing communal rather than individual pleasure. Where Marvell urges his coy mistress to seize time for love’s sake, Herrick urges his community to seize time for continuity’s sake. His is not a frantic grasping at pleasure but a steady affirmation of life’s cycles. The act of poetic toast becomes a vessel for permanence: the printed word immortalizes what the festival enacts temporarily.

Emotionally, “The Maypole” radiates benevolence. There is no irony, no cynicism—only warmth, hope, and good wishes. This sincerity is part of its power. In an age increasingly marked by religious strife and political fracture, Herrick’s poem offers a vision of harmony grounded in shared custom and mutual regard. The emotional impact lies not in grand gestures but in small, sincere blessings: may your hands be honored, may your marriages be prosperous, may your lineage flourish. Such sentiments, voiced with poetic economy, strike a deep chord because they speak to universal human desires—for recognition, for love, for legacy.

In sum, “The Maypole” is far more than a seasonal ditty. It is a crystalline expression of Herrick’s poetic ethos: that beauty, community, and ritual are not distractions from life’s seriousness but its very essence. Through its deft fusion of historical context, literary craft, and emotional generosity, the poem invites us not only to witness a May Day but to participate in its deeper meanings. Herrick, ever the celebrant-poet, reminds us that to raise a cup in blessing is to affirm life in all its fragility and fecundity. And in that affirmation—uttered in the shadow of a flowering pole, surrounded by the scent of spring—is poetry’s enduring gift.