A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.
Interpretation
Retribution is ineffective if it does not deliver justice or if the avenger is not recognized.
This quote by Edgar Allan Poe suggests that wrongs in society remain unaddressed not only when the punishment fails to occur but also when the person who seeks justice is not acknowledged. It emphasizes the importance of recognition and acknowledgment in the process of avenging wrongs, pointing to a deeper understanding of justice beyond mere retribution.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about social justice to emphasize the importance of recognition in addressing wrongs.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him desolate!) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed, Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed.
Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.
...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.
I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?
In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
No one doubts but that we imagine time from the very fact that we imagine other bodies to be moved slower or faster or equally fast. We are accustomed to determine duration by the aid of some measure of motion.
Yes, ISIL is a terror-based insurgent army that seeks to establish a Caliphate, but the group's actual end goal is far from political: ISIL believes that, through jihad, it will bring about the Day of Judgment. This is not true Islam.
Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no ‘day before’.
Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.
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