The Anatomy of Tragedy

Let’s mingle some death with our lovely myths
And take a page or two of papyrus, or stone.
Beware of flying things bearing strange gifts
Wrote no man yet I have yet to know.

From hoary Athens to the relic of Rome,
An eagle on high carried hard carrion.
Terrestrially bound below, a poets poor dome
Was strong eye spied, a thing to be smashed upon.

The talon claws acted like yawning jaws
Unloosing the clasped terrapin in shell
So that, now grasped under natural laws
And the full felt weight of earth, he fell

Down upon, crashing upon, the poet’s poor pate.
Dull thud, echo-eeking, calamitous knock,
Aeschylus could not write, but lived, this mistake;
The sad, sorry fate of a head for a rock.

Cracked and halved, the tortoise split for the feed.
The sharp beak and eye to tear and devour.
The skull, too, in mirror of the thing, lay cleaved 

As if opened and splayed on a dangerous hour

Like curtains that part for the act that brings death.

His cold ruddy blood flowed from a place
Winding round and down and round toward Lethe
Washing ashore on the hard banks of fate.

Plays upon a stage are often written this way.

Nature, when true, keeping all creatures in mind,
Unmaliced and free of care, simply throws her clay; 

As free from bound earth, her seeing is blind.

So in this new time of old wars waged for crowns,

While those who care less and less yet by degrees,
And try, as once was said, to ‘drink life to the lees,’
Good nature toasts to those follies of tragedy.