Rope
at the rope’s end I find a dead man
they have hanged all the words he could give
and all the good with hemp absolute as a heart
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 23 June 1663.
Dave Bonta
SourceLicence:CC BY-SA 4.0
at the rope’s end I find a dead man
they have hanged all the words he could give
and all the good with hemp absolute as a heart
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 23 June 1663.
The poem is a short, stark scene: the speaker follows a rope to its end and finds a dead man hanging there. Instead of describing the body, the poem turns to what has been lost. "They" have hanged "all the words he could give" and "all the good," as if the execution killed more than one person.
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