Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a  donation. Thanks!
Restrained no more, the last rebelling man,
Alone as he had always wished to be,
Sole monarch of himself, with not a clan,
Nor tribe, not state, nor nation left that he,
Protesting, must obey, has sat him down
Upon the last green acreage of sod
And woven of the pliant grass a crown
To show the rotted dead that he is God. To show the dead his is the only face;
His thought the only consciousness; his eye
The only judge of substance or o space;
His skull the only congruence with sky.
And singing loud his praise he spends his breath.
Extinguishing the universe in death.