What if I thought all my life, my life was sad?
Would I speak like a poet already dead,
Who became a king simply by what he said,
Dreaming of death, even in the sweetest dreams?
Though life is long, we must summarize it sweetly.
Sweet summation is the lyric law
The old poets followed, anxious
To remember love and the suffering it caused.
There’s too much to memorialize.
But if life is short, the monument is small,
The lyric too brief to be wise,
And we find in the lines no suffering at all.