Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.

Belloc’s couplet sets up paired opposites—loss/possession and death/life—and insists they are inseparable aspects of a single reality. The second line offers the governing image: shadow is not an independent force but a consequence of light; without the sun there can be no shadow. Read this way, grief, deprivation, and mortality are not merely negations but the “shadow” cast by love, attachment, and vitality. The lines suggest a stoic or religiously inflected consolation: suffering testifies to the presence of something good, and the very possibility of loss implies that something has been possessed and valued.