by The Cowl Editor on November 16, 2017
Poetry
by Jonathan Coppe ’18
Among the dusty shelves I see it nestled
—O wicked, foolish kin to leave it so!—
O, what dreams lie herein? What foreign lands
of sunset-colored love and joyful tears?
So off the shelf it comes and to a desk.
With greedy hands the cover comes undone.
And here I see some reference to a god
to whom the Ancient Greeks would slaughter lambs
immortalized in a now forgotten book.
—This fate does scarce inspire joy and awe…—
But half an hour in I have made out
that little have I grasped, although my eyes
run on and on and on across these lines.
Nor majesty nor beauty fill my heart.
Instead each weighty stanza more abstruse,
and every line the meaning veiled, opaque.
Could it be? This same world I lament
and sigh to see, is no less than the world
of poetry, and this is everything after all?