NOVEMBER, 1929 <br />Come (we say) Clemenceau. <br />Why should you live longer than others? The vacuum that sucked <br />Us down, and the former stars, draws at you also. <br /> <br />No wrench for a man near ninety. <br />They were younger who crowded us out of distinction the year you drove them <br />Like flies on a fire. We don't say it was wrong. <br /> <br />We don't say it was right. <br />These heavy choices are less than verbal, down here, to us dead. <br />Never a thorn in the crown of greatness down here. <br /> <br />Not even Wilson laments here <br />The cuckoo brood of design. This is the cave you conjectured; <br />Nothing in death, as nothing in life, surprises you. <br /> <br />You were not surprised when France <br />Put you aside, when the war was finished, as a sick man mending <br />Puts aside the strong poison that turned his fever. <br /> <br />You'd not be surprised to hear <br />Your enemies praising your name and the Paris cannon applaud you; <br />Not surprised, nor much pleased, nor envious of more. <br /> <br />Your negative straightness of mind <br />And bleached like a drowned man's cast-up thigh-bone by eroding age- <br />Hardly required the clear corrections of death.<br /><br />Robinson Jeffers<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-dead-to-clemenceau/
