Upon The Death of George Santayana (#poem)

Upon The Death of George Santayana

Down every passage of the cloister hung

A dark wood cross on a white plaster wall;

But in the court were roses, not as tongue

Might have them, something of Christ's blood grown small,

But just as roses, and at three o'clock

Their essences, inseparably bouqueted,

Seemed more than Christ's last breath, and rose to mock

An elderly man for whom the Sisters prayed.

What heart can know itself? The Sibyl speaks

Mirthless and unbedizened things, but who

Can fathom her intent? Loving the Greeks,

He whispered to a nun who strove to woo

His spirit unto God by prayer and fast,

"Pray that I go to Limbo, if it please

Heaven to let my soul regard at last

Democritus, Plato and Socrates."

And so it was. The river, as foretold,

Ran darkly by; under his tongue he found

Coin for the passage; the ferry tossed and rolled;

The sages stood on their appointed ground,

Sighing, all as foretold. The mind was tasked;

He had not dreamed that so many had died.

"But where is Alcibiades," he asked,

"The golden roisterer, the animal pride?"

Those sages who had spoken of the love

And enmity of things, how all things flow,

Stood in a light no life is witness of,

And Socrates, whose wisdom was to know 

He did not know, spoke with a solemn mien,

And all his wonderful ugliness was lit,

"He whom I loved for what he might have been

Freezes with traitors in the ultimate pit."

-Anthony Hecht

George Santayana (1863-1952) was a Spanish-American philosopher, poet, novelist. Perhaps his most famous work is The Sense of Beauty: Being an Outline of Aesthetic Theory. He was born a Catholic in Spain, lived most of life in the U.S. He lost his faith somewhere along the way and did not wish to regain it. But he lived out the end of his life by choice in a Catholic hospital in Rome.

Anthony Hecht  (1923-2004) was an American poet. There was an article I read recently by A. E. Stallings about Hecht, lamenting (a bit--her feelings are mostly positive, but occasionally mixed) how he isn't as well-known as he once was. There is a new collected poems volume as well as a new biography that she reviews.

She mentions several of Hecht's better-known poems, but not this one, which is a favourite of mine. She does mention Hecht's sometimes rococo vocabulary, which you can possibly find in evidence here. (Unbedizened, any one? 😉)

 I do think Hecht (or Socrates) is a little hard on Alcibiades, though.