Portrait of a Slain Man

Bloody locks fall from sunken cheeks;

Direly, two rows of hideous teeth run

Between black lips opened in a cry for help: thus do

Parched bones jut out of graves: the folded hands

Covered by a pallor that turns blue under cracked nails:

For in the desolate, frightening forest he fearfully

Struggled with masked murderers; the treetops echoed

With his panicked cries and the murderous murmurs

Of his foes; soon the strength of the struggler wore out,

He stretched slack arms in vain to hold off the slaying axes

From his head; instead of scaring away shy birds

From the fallen trees, they now cruelly

Split the brain-splattering skull of the dying man,

Whose soul unwillingly rose from his rattling chest.—

Ranging hunters found the distorted body

In the sea of its own blood, from which small blades of grass

Shyly raised their speckled tips: they brought

Him to his inconsolable widow, for whom his dark eye

Still seemed to feel pity: still visible on his cheek was

His usual friendly look; on his disfigured forehead,

The recognizable wrinkle that a foreboding care

Would often plant there in melancholic hours.—

With truer fame than undefeated victors who are

Great only in fortune, at heart wild as tigers, and who

Strive to win things through rigor and rage

And unheard-of slaughter;

With truer fame than many a miser purchases,

Who boasts the venal humility of a rhymester,

Like a straw man decked out with rags

That frightens children;

With truer fame this man is rewarded,

In whom virtue lives with wisdom,

The teacher of mankind, he who himself practices

And honors what he teaches,

Whose keen eye was never blinded by a glimmer,

Who would never grovelingly call folly wisdom,

Who often ripped the mask, which we should shun,

Off of Folly's face.

There lay the wares of the court and of fraternal orders,

And military medals, turbans, and tiaras,

Priestly vestments, veils, frocks, and coats

That hide Folly,

And she stood naked. She garnered

Revulsion and laughter. But the despisers

Of the plain work smock and the smoky huts

Together with their customs

Watched her there in awe: the one who disdains the splendor

Of thrones: high Wisdom, abiding there,

She who is unresentful in understanding and heart

Lives and thinks there.