Here is my gift, not roses on your grave, not sticks of burning incense. You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain. You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes, and suffocated inside stifling walls. Alone you let the terrible stranger in, and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word about your troubled and exalted life. Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn at your dumb funeral feast. Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I, I, sick with grief for the buried past, I, smoldering on a slow fire, having lost everything and forgotten all, would be fated to commemorate a man so full of strength and will and bright inventions, who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me, hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.
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The Solitary answered: Such a Form Full well I recollect. We often crossed Each other's path; but, as the Intruder seemed Fondly to prize the silence which he kept, And I as willingly did cherish mine, We met, and passed, like shadows. I have heard, From my good Host, that being crazed in brain By unrequited love, he scaled the rocks, Dived into caves, and pierced the matted woods, In hope to find some virtuous herb of power To cure his malady!
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We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world -- mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
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