Final Ruin fiercely drives Her ploughshare o'er creation.

Edward Young (1683–1765), an Anglican clergyman and poet, is best known for his long devotional poem *The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality* (commonly *Night Thoughts*), published in the 1740s. The work belongs to the “graveyard” tradition of meditative verse, dwelling on mortality, the fragility of worldly achievement, and the leveling power of time and death. The image of “Final Ruin” as a force that ploughs over creation reflects the poem’s recurrent apocalyptic and memento-mori imagery—civilizations, monuments, and individual lives alike are ultimately overturned. Young’s aim is moral and religious: to turn the reader from temporal pride toward spiritual preparation and immortality.

The couplet personifies ultimate destruction—whether time, death, or the end of the world—as an implacable farmer driving a plough across the surface of existence. A plough both cuts and overturns; the metaphor suggests not a gentle decay but a violent, comprehensive erasure that leaves no structure intact. By calling it “Final Ruin,” Young intensifies the idea from ordinary loss to an absolute terminus: everything made is subject to being “furrowed” back into the earth. In the moral logic of *Night Thoughts*, such imagery is meant to humble human ambition and to reframe “creation” as transient, urging the reader to seek permanence beyond the material world.