The State of Man, pp. 440-441

Opening Remarks
Man hangs between two worlds, one that calls him upwards and another ties him and pulls him down. Such is our dubious fate.

Register of calamities
A growing register of calamities
Is the past’s account, the future’s book of Fate:
The centuries pile man’s follies and man’s crimes
Upon the countless crowd of Nature’s ills;
As if the world’s stone load was not enough,
A crop of miseries obstinately is sown
By his own hand in the furrows of the gods,
The vast increasing tragic harvest reaped
From old misdeeds buried by oblivious Time.

The balance sheet of our life shows only a growing register of ills and calamities. Our follies and crimes add to Nature’s ills. As if the world’s misery and difficulties were not enough that we sow the seeds of suffering with our own hands. It is out of these seeds that we reap tragic harvest from old misdeeds buried in the forgotten past.

Own worst foe
He walks by his own choice into Hell’s trap;
This mortal creature is his own worst foe.

The biggest enemy of man is none other than man himself who walks into hell by his own choice.

Slays his happiness
His science is an artificer of doom;
He ransacks earth for means to harm his kind;
He slays his happiness and others’ good.

With his own hands man slays his happiness and others’ good through a science that ransacks the earth and finds ways to harm and bring doom upon himself and other human beings.

Nothing has he learnt
Nothing has he learned from Time and its history;
Even as of old in the raw youth of Time,
When Earth ignorant ran on the highways of Fate,
Old forms of evil cling to the world’s soul:
War making nought the sweet smiling calm of life,
Battle and rapine, ruin and massacre
Are still the fierce pastimes of man’s warring tribes;
An idiot hour destroys what centuries made,
His wanton rage or frenzied hate lays low
The beauty and greatness by his genius wrought
And the mighty output of a nation’s toil.

Man seems to have learnt nothing from history as he keeps repeating the old ways. War and battle and plunder and rape and massacre are still the ways of men destroying in a moment of fury what has taken centuries to build. His on rage and frenzy and hate brings down the beauty and greatness that his own genius has brought and the mighty output of a nation and its work.

Drags to the precipice
All he has achieved he drags to the precipice.

All he has learnt he drags to edge of abyss.

Epic of doom and fall
His grandeur he turns to an epic of doom and fall;
His littleness crawls content through squalor and mud,
He calls heaven’s retribution on his head
And wallows in his self-made misery.

He turns his grandeur into an epic of doom and fall, his littleness crawls content through the mud and mire of nature. He himself calls heaven’s retribution and wallows in his self-made misery.

His will conspires
A part author of the cosmic tragedy,
His will conspires with death and time and fate.

To add to the woes of cosmic tragedies his own will conspires with death and adverse fate.

Closing Remarks
Thus the queen laments the fate of man who himself is, partly at least, the author of his pain.