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Last Voyage Of Ulysses
Look how it looms upon the far horizon:
huge, even at that distance---Purgatory,
rising out of the timeless, flattened sea,
prodigious in its solitary height,
about which constellate the stars of night.
This is no drunken sailor's stammered story,
and not some priest's or poet's allegory,
solely, although the stuff of poetry
consists upon it. There is slope and space
for clustered life, arisen by Christ's grace,
or cast down (by proud choice) and off the base
on to the water-covered rocks and shoals,
where perish those incorrigible souls
whose choose the baser, spurn the beautiful,
and sever into slivered parts, the whole.
And you, cunning Ulysses, keep your eyes on
it; you know, now, you will be one of them
that sink. Your unrepented deeds condemn
your spirit that, expressive of its style,
preferred the scorn and subterfuge of guile.
Your brave ship, crashed, will splinter on cold stone;
as, drawing back, you find yourself alone---
no crew to bolster you, no man to crown
your effort with heroic lines to read
in Ithaca. Unnoticed, you will drown---
a broken corpse entangled in sea weed.
The waves that kill you have no hesitation
before your petty "lordship's" domination.
Your dying glimpse will see the pastel glory
of morning's shimmer on Mount Purgatory.
Then, under you, a mouth will start to swell---
anticipating your descent to hell.
