Follow-up poem: "In Memory of Harold Bloom"

In Memory of Harold Bloom

“The time when we shall see, hear, and do no more

is nigh in one’s later eighties,” wrote professor Bloom,

“the world’s greatest literary critic,” bringing his last

book Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of  

Criticism to closure (there may be more posthumous

books), and his nigh became fact Monday, October 14,

2019, Canada’s Thanksgiving Day, when the inveterate

teacher of the world’s great literature crossed the Great

Divide at the age of 89 in New Haven, Connecticut,

forlorn and melancholy, unable to appease his restless

spirit with the world’s great literature that he read and

reread with preternatural speed, much of which he

could recite at will so prodigious was his memory, a

literary savant whose brilliance drew me like a moth

to a flame, and now he’s gone, no more. “The rest is

silence,” he would say, quoting his god William

Shakespeare. Dead but not gone, he will live forever

in his many books, the melancholy light of his life-long

endeavor to satisfy the longing in his soul for meaning

and purpose that he failed to glean, “a tale told by an

idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing,”

an irony much too deep for tears.