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

Thompson’s quatrain frames human existence as inseparable from suffering and cost. Birth is “paid” by another’s pain (the mother’s labor, and more broadly the sacrifices that make any life possible), while death is met with one’s “own” moan—personal suffering, fear, or the solitary fact of dying. The opening claim, “Nothing begins, and nothing ends, / That is not paid with moan,” generalizes this into a bleak moral economy: every threshold—origins and endings, changes and closures—demands a toll of grief. The lines compress a tragic, almost liturgical view of life’s cycle, emphasizing shared vulnerability and the inevitability of suffering as the price of being.