Hamlet Micure by Edgar Lee Masters — Read

In a lingering fever many visions come to you:

I was in the little house again / With its great yard of clover / Running down to the board-fence, / Shadowed by the oak tree, / Where we children had our swing.

Yet the little house was a manor hall / Set in a lawn, and by the lawn was the sea.

I was in the room where little Paul / Strangled from diphtheria, / But yet it was not this room --

It was a sunny verandah enclosed / With mullioned windows, / And in a chair sat a man in a dark cloak, / With a face like Euripides.

He had come to visit me, or I had gone to visit him --

I could not tell.

We could hear the beat of the sea, the clover nodded / Under a summer wind, and little Paul came / With clover blossoms to the window and smiled.

Then I said: "What is 'divine despair' Alfred?"

"Have you read Tears, Idle Tears? " he asked.

"Yes, but you do not there express divine despair."

"My poor friend," he answered, "that was why the despair / Was divine. "