Epistle III: Charlotte to Werther

Peace! Werther, no more raging words at last:
Your silence compliments the graveyard frost;
Your spirit, freed from Time's profane cocoon,
Timelessly flutters through the perfumed dune.
But Memory shall never let you rest
As I read and arranged your words depressed -
You live again! Your words arouse my heart!
Yet more than live! They split my world apart:
My fountained tears press through your pensive leaves,
Reluctantly your words perform as thieves
To rip me from appearances aligned
And flung me to the tempest of your mind...
Perchance if words may bring the dead alive,
Then let me write, and your presence revive.

These pages here I hold within my grip,
Some felt my anger, some, my upper lip;
All prone to fire and ought to be destroyed,
But Werther! How they filled my aching void!
If you desired to hold me in your breast,
Then now your being I in full possess.
Your letters bring your essence to my mind,
And let me to your smiles and sighs be blind.
O! time and space unfold, progress and funnel
Through your viewpoint - like beams of light that travel
Across an optic glass, dispersing rays
Of rainbow to the unaffected gaze -
Revealing all of your complexities:
The origin of your heavy imageries,
The colours of your bold philosophies.
All these and more your words have clearly caught;
Your letters form a Werther in my thought.
Yet not a ghostly Werther for the eyes
But one who speaks on without my replies -
A stream of consciousness errupting from
A fountain of emotions, bottled dumb
By policies, politics and politeness,
Then exploded onto the pages' whiteness.
My eyes on you, unaffected before,
Now see beyond your flesh, into your core;
My soul with you, though ink and paper bounded,
Now by the bubbling stream of passion drowned.

Drowned! Werther, no more raging words at last!
Nature has formed and consumed you too fast:
Just as Narcissus came to his fatal pool,
Noticed himself a most delightful jewel
And could not take the image off his sight
Until he kisses the imaginary knight
And dies in love, so Werther, you likewise
Have, in narcistic love, your own demise.
You wrote in language; language wrote in turn
A double for which you unconsicously yearned.
In words you anchor your entire life,
'Tis with reality you fight your strife.
Your pitying words become your pitiful world,
Reality, by words and letters, hurled
Out of your mind; imagination took
A pen and painted the trees and the brook,
The flowers and the mountain, clouds and sky -
Unlimited is your poetic supply!
But no one lives in a world of his own,
Most selfishly - in the imagination alone.
Arachne, full of godless arrogance,
Wove out a text in self-important trance -
A text unfit for mortal minds to know,
(The deeds of gods, desires of men below),
And to a spider fittingly transformed,
Condemned to weave forever, thus deformed.
My Werther, now in letters you must live,
Your voice may cry; my soul will not forgive.

O you declared your death, a proud decree!
You lived a life admired, noble and free!
How easily you may take away your life
And leave because you cannot find a wife!
Not everyone may live a life of words,
Not everyone may fly to Heav'n like birds:
Mothers have sons and daughters to be fed,
Peasants have families starving for their bread.
Responsiblities can't be erased,
Nor mother's love can simply be replaced.
That Werther may to Hades bravely dive,
But Charlotte has mourn her friend alive.

Oh Werther! no more of my raging words!
Your tragic choice has tore my heart to thirds!
Your heavy spirits shall rest in heav'nly peace,
But let your love in epistles release.