“Beautiful” she said;
And none can her gainsay.
The poetess who spoke,
then, in quiet, passed away.
Cossetted within her husband’s arms,
frail and small in death’s repose,
Never again would she put pen to paper.
No more sonnets would her art compose.
Her illnesses had dogged her all her life.
Only morphine kept the pain at bay.
It also gave to her a heightened sense
of the beauty of mundane reality.
How vividly did her expressive eyes
Put words to thoughts and thoughts to
printed page.
She was the wild enthusiast of life,
whose poetry was the spirit of the age.