In a lingering fever many visions come to you: <br />I was in the little house again <br />With its great yard of clover <br />Running down to the board-fence, <br />Shadowed by the oak tree, <br />Where we children had our swing. <br />Yet the little house was a manor hall <br />Set in a lawn, and by the lawn was the sea. <br />I was in the room where little Paul <br />Strangled from diphtheria, <br />But yet it was not this room -- <br />It was a sunny verandah enclosed <br />With mullioned windows, <br />And in a chair sat a man in a dark cloak, <br />With a face like Euripides. <br />He had come to visit me, or I had gone to visit him -- <br />I could not tell. <br />We could hear the beat of the sea, the clover nodded <br />Under a summer wind, and little Paul came <br />With clover blossoms to the window and smiled. <br />Then I said: "What is 'divine despair,' Alfred?" <br />"Have you read 'Tears, Idle Tears'?" he asked. <br />"Yes, but you do not there express divine despair." <br />"My poor friend," he answered, "that was why the despair <br />Was divine."<br /><br />Edgar Lee Masters<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/hamlet-micure/
