Amado Nervo wrote En paz in the last phase of his life, the one gathered in Elevación (1917): an older Nervo, serene, closer to religious meditation than to the modernista glitter of his beginnings. The poem is a reckoning. From "very near my sunset", the poet looks back over his whole life and settles the account: he blesses life because it owes him nothing and he reproaches it with nothing.
Its central idea is a single, hard one: "I was the architect of my own destiny." The good and the bad he tasted were his own, because he put into things the honey or the gall he later drew from them; if he planted rosebushes, he harvested roses. It is an ethics of responsibility and acceptance, without complaint and with no outstanding debts, in alexandrine lines of an almost proverbial clarity.
Nervo — a Mexican poet and diplomat, one of the most widely read voices of modernismo — died in 1919, two years after publishing it, while serving as minister in Montevideo. The poem stands as his farewell and his epitaph: life never promised him an eternal May, and he does not hold it against life. "Vida, nada me debes! Vida, estamos en paz!" — Life, you owe me nothing; Life, we are at peace.
The verse is kept in Spanish. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.