The Facts
Can a man face the facts of life and laugh? . . .
Swift faced them and died mad, deaf and diseased.
Shakespeare spoke out, went home, and wrote no more.
Oblivion was the only epitaph
They asked, as private persons, having eased
Their spirits of the burden that they bore.
The facts of life are fierce. One feels a wraith
When facing them with luminous lyric faith.
Daring to look within us, we discern
The jungle. To the jungle we return
More easily than most of us admit.
In this thought-riddled twentieth-century day
I cannot read—say ‘Gulliver’—and feel gay,
Or share—in ‘Lear’—the pleasure of the Pit.
Swift faced them and died mad, deaf and diseased.
Shakespeare spoke out, went home, and wrote no more.
Oblivion was the only epitaph
They asked, as private persons, having eased
Their spirits of the burden that they bore.
The facts of life are fierce. One feels a wraith
When facing them with luminous lyric faith.
Daring to look within us, we discern
The jungle. To the jungle we return
More easily than most of us admit.
In this thought-riddled twentieth-century day
I cannot read—say ‘Gulliver’—and feel gay,
Or share—in ‘Lear’—the pleasure of the Pit.
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