Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.

The couplet strings together a set of emblematic contrasts—labor and sleep, tempest and harbor, war and ease, life and death—to argue that relief is sweetest when it follows hardship. The final comparison, “death after life,” pushes the pattern to its limit, suggesting that death can be conceived not only as loss but as rest or release after the struggles of living. In a Renaissance moral and poetic tradition that often treats life as pilgrimage or warfare, the line frames mortality as the ultimate “ease,” intensifying the consolatory logic of the earlier images.