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“…very witty and intelligent and divinely beautiful….But, alas, very fragile.” Siegfried Sassoon writing to Henry Festing-Jones about Stephen Tennant
Because the universe is doomed to die
(The prime blue stars the shortest lived of all),
Because all matter, light and warmth will fly
Away to stretched oblivion, the small
Thing men name love waits fated, threaped—of course.
It doesn’t matter if the young man wastes
Away with illness. Destiny looms coarse
For everything. A poet’s luscious tastes
In young male skin are trapped in threatened breath
No matter how much beauty chests contain.
To prettier or wittier comes death.
He’ll vanish without so much as a stain.
Then hero soldier poet disappears
In Rome’s confessional, unmanned by tears.
~ Phillip Whidden
[This sonnet is part of a so far unposted sonnet sequence about the life, loves and literature of Siegfried Sassoon.]