Nightmare Of A Nightingale.

Really, it had to be just so,

your life had to be brief and painful.

Its briefness, its pain, served us ideally.

As for the nature of your going,

—the all too imaginable wretchedness

of that incurable double doom

of frustrated love and consuming illness—

well, no doubt it's cruel to say it,

but your happiness might have been our loss.

No! Subtract neither sigh nor syllable,

not one speck of your crimson spit,

not one pang of your pathetic passing.

Why tamper with what's just right,

just right to yield what was wanting?

One perfectly unique John Keats!