Imagines Vitae Poem by Bernard McEvoy

Man's no mere scribe, who in the cloistered gloom
Of some old convent sits away his life,
Who at his trencher finds his only strife-
The rest fat peace-as in his narrow room
He writes till blinded by Time's darkening rheum.
An image rather find in one who leaving wife,
And child, and friends, proclaims war to the knife
With luxury, and seeks his unknown doom
Among the mountains, where the ages lie
Buried 'neath miles of monumental stone-
Region of distance, height, immensity-
Writes with his heart's blood in those spaces lone
His last sad message. There, where eagles cry,
They find his bones: far still the highest cone!