Nothing begins, and nothing ends,
That is not paid with moan;
For we are born in other’s pain,
And perish in our own.

Thompson’s lines compress a bleak, almost liturgical view of human existence into a tight quatrain: every threshold—beginning or ending—carries a cost paid in suffering. Birth is “other’s pain,” foregrounding the mother’s labor and, more broadly, the way one life is ushered in through another’s travail. Death is “our own,” emphasizing the solitary, personal character of dying and the private reckoning it entails. The couplet structure turns the thought into a moral symmetry: life is bracketed by moans, suggesting that joy and achievement are never free of the bodily and emotional toll that makes them possible.