These are the confessions of a mask.
I looked in the mirror and saw a ghost.
Of all lost causes I miss this one the most.
These are the questions you must not ask.
These are the oaks that once stood here.
And shall the earth be all of paradise
That we will know? Roll the dice;
These are the nights when praise turns into fear.
These are the memories of a man without a past.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Therefore, let us sport us while we may.
These are the reveries of a man who climbed the mast.
These are the reasons the student failed the course.
Some mute inglorious Milton
Against windmills did go tilting.
These are the seasons of a girl and her horse.
These are the days of sunlight and high skies.
Did she put on his knowledge with his power?
Unseal the earth and lift love in her shower.
These are the ways the humble man is wise.
These are the questions you must not ask.
Was it a vision or a waking dream?
Let be be finale of seem.
These are the confessions of a mask.
From New and Selected Poems by David Lehman (Scribner, 2013) First published on Slate, June 28, 2005.
https://slate.com/culture/2005/06/confessions-of-a-mask.html
Comment on the poem:
John Ashbery gave me the title. He had always liked it, he said, alerting me to Yukio Mishima's second novel, Confessions of a Mask, in which life is not a cabaret but a masquerade, with everyone wearing (metaphoric) masks either as a cover, an effort to be seen as conforming to some social norm, or as a false personality, contrived in line with Erving Goffman's theory in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. I liked the title independent of its source and was as turned on by the A-B-B-A stanza as by the impulse to weave in lines lifted from Thomas Gray, Keats, Yeats, Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane. The echoes seemed to reinforce a feeling of inevitability. -- DL
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