A  N o t e  o n  E.  P.

This is not a definitive criticism but canto lxxxi
can be read as a mind's horror at a dream's implosion

as his resignation and adherence to a few crucial facts
which even as he writes he pays the cost of

(and this I do not attempt to excuse)
rises above it & shines a complex lucidity

upon the essence of his woe.
The world & its selected history has been/still is his theme

where what he has rejected & what he extols
vie for prominence. Two perceptions struggle here

two lives (one of which he might have led)
depict the other as failure as language swirls and hovers to find

a secular core at which it can worship —finds none
but the one it has embraced by writing of its confusion

as it embraces the self it espouses and the self it seeks to negate