MEANING WHO?
Who did Pythagoras have in mind
Among the hosts of human kind
When speaking of the "living dead"?
Was it of those whose souls have fled:
Lost souls whose horrors few may learn,
Or those we meet at every turn:
The people who are sunken deep
In self-regard, and, dead asleep?
WHY AND HOW
Most people know that thoughts are things
Of instant speed on varied wings,
But who knows how and who knows why
These things loom larger when we die?
Does death tear down the fence between
The flesh and thought, befouled or clean,
To amplify a thousandfold
All things forgotten or grown cold?
And are our after states of death
Spun here and now from breath to breath?
MARTYRDOM
Why should one spurn chagrin or grief?
Or would one, thinking, just as lief
Be martyr to some galling thought
And care not what its future brought?
If we recount our thoughts and deeds,
In hades or in heavenly meads,
And these make up our after states,
Would we keep making hades dates?