The Besotted Bard

Under the dark shadows of a crescent moon,

In the company of two poets, bewitched i lay;

Two brothers, united not by bond of blood,

Incarcerated together in a prison of passion;

Like confluence of two rivers, distinct,

Unbridled their paths crossed,

in a fire that didn't extinct.

So much he personified, a tale Sam told,

Drenched in opium, resplendence he mold;

Delusion became a constant company,

Hallucination a sordid affinity;

Torturing himself to sparkles of brilliance,

Inundated by a river of radiance.

In darkness he mingled,

Became a part of black;

In gloom he cremated,

All that the wand of opium had conjured;

From opium to ashes,

His verses bled through gashes.

Only to be redeemed and revived,

Through an infirm Dorothy Wordsworth the tale survived;

Fingers of poetry, fiddling with strings of harmony,

The rime not to be obliterated in memory;

Struck many; a hammer of profound awe,

Cursed and praised, shunned and prized, by old and raw.

P.S. : The poem is based on the literary rivalry between friends and contemporaries Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth (as is depicted in the motion picture 'Pandaemonium'.). How Wordsworth disapproved of Coleridge and his poem 'Kubla Khan' and how at the end it had been Wordsworth's sister Dorothy who led to its (the poem's) revival.