Children of the Night

Verlaine

     Why do you dig like long-clawed scavengers
     To touch the covered corpse of him that fled
     The uplands for the fens, and rioted
     Like a sick satyr with doom's worshippers?
     Come! let the grass grow there; and leave his verse
     To tell the story of the life he led.
     Let the man go:  let the dead flesh be dead,
     And let the worms be its biographers.

     Song sloughs away the sin to find redress
     In art's complete remembrance:  nothing clings
     For long but laurel to the stricken brow
     That felt the Muse's finger; nothing less
     Than hell's fulfilment of the end of things
     Can blot the star that shines on Paris now.