The Same River Twice

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remember’d how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy Nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

The preceding elegy for Heraclitus, translated from the original Greek of Callimachus, remains William Johnson Cory’s most famous contribution to poetry. For his part, Heraclitus refused funerary rites, remarking “Corpses are more fit to be cast out than dung.”

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