Robert Lowell
EPITAPH OF A FALLEN POET
When England gives the laurel to some dope
Or screw who scrubs Catullus' tongue with soap,
Perhaps he will consider why I took
This crooked turn, instead of Uncle Sam's
Good offices that only health can buy.
Because I knew my classics like a book,
Stranger from England, tell the British: I,
Catullus Redivivus,
once the rage
Of Rome and Paris, used to play your role
Of homosexual wolfing the stray lambs
Who hunger by the Place de la Concorde.
My profit was a pocket with a hole.
Who asks for X, the Shelley of the age,
Must pay pound sterling for his bed and board.
George Barker
THE BALLAD OF WILD CHI LDREN
Down the long hall of night fly those wild children
Conceived in a dream.
The great gales rage in the trees outside the window
And, curved like a scream,
The moon, for a moment visible in the tempest,
Cries out as it drowns,
But still down the long hall of night fly those wild children
My heart disowns.
o
orphans of those great egoes
in
their eyries
Both claw and lamb
