Elegy For a Poet

Once you sailed upon the dawn to grace the eaves of Pomona's verdant lawn, but now in splendor you have drooped; no longer shall you unleash torrents from your tongue. Oh, white-hot zephyr of the morning, How I wish your fall had come with warning! Now your incandescent train is gloom; no more will you water the thirsty orchards and summer-famished corn. When you trawled the horizon with golden voice, and with your sickle sliced the noise, I never thought your time might be curtailed, cut down by blade sharper than the one you hoisted. Pluck Apollo's lyre: scatter drops of pearlescent dew, Once your music winged over tangles of elm and yew, yet never shall the harmonies of eternity be dampened: or so I thought before the sapphire goblet was drained to the lees. Words are immortal beings: spinning, flailing, sinning, wailing: We cannot taste fluttering rose-buds but we can send language tailing, to hoop, bedeck with gilt the firmament and shoot rays of opalescent ecstasy to blind rogues into submission. Yet far more and far higher is life than words can tell: What more can be said? Strike the ages-worn bell. Let it shoot its brawny waves over the seas, and whip its well-worn message to the stars.