The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

The image of “leaves” falling “one by one” frames human life as seasonal and steadily diminishing: each leaf suggests a day, a person, or a moment dropping away irretrievably. Read as FitzGeraldian in tone, it aligns with his recurrent preoccupation (especially in his work as translator-adaptor) with transience, mortality, and the quiet, incremental nature of loss rather than sudden catastrophe. The line’s simplicity makes it elegiac: it invites contemplation of time’s unshowy attrition and the inevitability of endings, while also implying that meaning may lie in attentiveness to what remains on the branch—what is still living—before the last leaf falls.