W.S. Merwin - Night Singing

Long after Ovid’s story of Philomela

has gone out of fashion and after the testimonials

of Hafiz and Keats have been smothered in comment

and droned dead in schools and after Eliot has gone home

from the Sacred Heart and Ransom has spat and consigned

to human youth what he reduced to fairy numbers

after the name has become slightly embarrassing

and dried skins have yielded their details and tapes have been

slowed and analyzed and there is nothing at all

for me to say one nightingale is s...