fourteen temporal antimonies. Poetically, these pairs of opposites serve as poetic merisms; they convey a sense of the totality of human endeavor in all its manifold forms. Scholars have labored hard to discern some kind of systematic structure, but to no avail. Yet the series is no mere hodgepodge of contrasting moments. The first line refers to birth and death (v. 2), and the last mentions war and peace (v. 8), forming an envelope of ultimacy. Within this poetic bracket, the catalog covers a gamut