Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/poetry-sinking-feeling Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Former poet laureate and NewsHour contributor Robert Pinsky offers some poetic solace to those hit hard by the stock market. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. ROBERT PINSKY: One of the truisms about the stock market, is the cliche that whatever rises must fall.William Wordsworth's sonnet "Mutability" puts that idea memorably, with some good terms for avarice and cheating, too. The poem, a commentary on highs and lows, begins:From low to high doth dissolution climb, And sink from high to low, along a scale Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail; A musical but melancholy chime, Which they can hear who meddle not with crime, Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care.In the rest of the poem Wordsworth moralizes that Time catches up with anything, and eventually exposes the difference between truth and baloney that pretends to be truth:Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear The longest date do melt like frosty rime, That ni the morning whitened hill and plain And is no more; drop like the tower sublime Of yesterday, which royally did wear His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch of Time."The unimaginable touch of Time" – it's almost as though he were reading the business pages of a hundred and eighty years ahead.