from Odes: 10. Chorus of Furies

Guarda mi disse, le feroce Erine Let us come upon him first as if in a dream, anonymous triple presence, memory made substance and tally of heart’s rot: then in the waking Now be demonstrable, seem sole aspect of being’s essence, coffin to the living touch, self’s Iscariot. Then he will loath the year’s recurrent long caress without hope of divorce, envying idiocy’s apathy or the stress of definite remorse. He will lapse into a halflife lest the taut force of the mind’s eagerness recall those fiends or new apparitions endorse his excessive distress. He will shrink, his manhood leave him, slough selfaware the last skin of the flayed: despair. He will nurse his terror carefully, uncertain even of death’s solace, impotent to outpace dispersion of the soul, disruption of the brain.