Barber's Adagio For Strings and The Death of Virgil

What is sad, is sad as a refrain,
A refrain that broke out from itself,
As the saddest music of all,
When it broke, adagio,
It carried itself like the broken shards of mirrors
Please know me, know me now
Know that I am broken.

This sadness is not wholely believed in.
It is sadness by the strings of an orchestra
Played by the seriousness of players in the orchestra
Stern, perhaps even stoic faces
Of the string players
Their stone carved stern faces
Become a frieze in a Roman villa,
Well, yes, perhaps,
Yes, and even the Death of Virgil
The strings ride
And the rowing of the trireme
The gathering of sounds
The ocean and the wind

Somewhere, in that absurd decadence
When there was only the presentation of greatness
Not the grim utter eventuality of death camps!
When "man" finally proved, yes, he could be evil
Well, we've known it for a long time
Isn't that the sum of the question?

Below us slaves drive this ship
The Death of Virgil would have us know
That fateful and bitterly sardonic novel
A monument of beauty
By a man who utterly disbelieved in himself!

The slaves drive the ship: the gathering of sound
Comes first through their paddling
It is a first conscious sound
Oars in waves
The stretching of ropes,
Straining against the wind
Baring us into that fateful twilight
Along with the great and dying poet
Already making his voyage to meet Caesar
Corrupt and dejected
Ruler of the fucking world
The saddest man of all
Because he knows he only rules this thing
Such a man is already dead:
He knows his desire is behind him.

Would not Virgil search out some blessed priest or seer?
Or one of those fucking sages?
Why be detained
With the ruler of the world!
Is that the most a man can do?

And there the blessed Poet
We listen with his ears
Hearing the sounds
Before he will go
The sounds we imagine
Before we go.

And the voyage of that final ship will be sealed with the fates and faces of this life
All the images and stories we dared to listen to
Yes and all the images
Will bind and seal our ship
Or it will spring holes
And we will sink to the bottom of the ocean
Let it go
Let the ship clatter and fall into the sea
Let the limping carcass of a great ship
It's dark shape slouching towards Bethlehem
Toward the slumbering shape of perfect innocence
The Christ Child
Before the shape great and terrible evil Beast
Let it go.

(forgive me this terrible poetry, please forgive me
Whoever who might actually read me
With a desire to know me seriously
I know you must laugh and say:
"Ayres is simply at it agian
With his bad cliches
Listening to a CD that his mother thought
Would be good for him to hear.")

So the ship fails
So these arguments
All these presentations
Remonstrations, demonstrations
Will not go, will not hold before death
The greatest orator
Still has words that fall into utter silence!
(The audience, hushed, already dead, as in some Beckettian alternative.)

What is there to do but turn to the breeze
To the butterflies of color?
What is there to do when you turn and face death?