Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Hunter S. Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005)
Totally Gonzo
The Hunter S. Thompson Community
RIP – Thank You for the Inspirations
On of Hunter’s favourites, and one of mine.
Anyways, this was Hunter’s favourite poem. See how much it could be applied to him.
In memory of Yeats, by WH Auden
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Great post and a great poem!
Thank you Hunter, for a lot of things.
You’ll be missed, but never forgotten.
Rest in Peace dear Hunter, thank you for transforming the way I think and see life.
And thank you Ron, for being so cool and keeping a place for all things Hunter S. Thompson.
~Sydney
Cazart!
Four years already?
Well, I guess there is one consolation….
Which is, that unlike Nixon, there will always be ‘more’ for Virginia’s boy.
More years, I mean.
____
My take on the death of the last of America’s real dreamers, written at the time it happened, is here if anybody is interested.
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