your bridge home
Saints and Poets
He told his readers at the end exactly why he had made the poem beautiful, and it was not a compliment to them.
At the end of a long poem about a man learning to give up the woman he loved, the poet stopped.
He stepped out from behind the story, and explained himself to the reader. He had not written it, he said, to give pleasure. He had written it because the subject was liberation, and liberation is hard to swallow. So he had made it beautiful. The way a physician smears honey round the rim of a cup before handing over a bitter medicine.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.