Classic Poem

My darkest hour:
I lie in bed, my lungs ringed with an iron band of pain,
A tightening band when I breathe,
And a great carbuncle on my forehead.

Now if I could die, if I could slip away,
My epitaph, “He also is a Failure” …

Life is too heavy upon me … I have made a brave fight,
Fought alone against odds of the world and against the devouring God of the artist …
I have known the omnipotence of inspiration,
Hewed plain tales out of the rock of life,
Poured song, and drained and lost my soul …

But to be an artist, what is it?
Vision and unreality, where pain only has the sting of truth …
It is to be a whimpering child unable to carry the day's load,
And then one darkens, and hurls lightnings and slays love,
And then one lies inert in one's own deep waters,
And then terrific battle and omnipotence and creation,
And one goes as a god who becomes a whimpering child again …

Better to end it … I am not of the heroic stuff of the great …
My wife reads Sophocles to me and Homer,
My soul floats back to the singer's home in Greece,
I have dropped three thousand years of fever for the cool Hellenic calm …
Why write, when all is written?

Yes: I will put by the singer—
I ask for paper, and in my pain, through the long hours, I echo Greece in rhyme.