When Queeney, his imperious daughter,
found Mr. Thrale stretched out after his stroke, lying
flat on the floor of his house in Grosvenor Square,
she naturally enquired.
“‘I chuse it,” replied Mr. Thrale.
Firmly.
“I lie so a-purpose.”
Henry Thrale ate voraciously
He could abstain from wine, but when he drank
he became without reservation a person drinking.
The little vessels of his head,
given their instructions, behaved appropriately.
He died that night. His wife had tried to warn him.
His physicians had tried, Dr. Johnson had tried to warn him.
But finding the smallest grain of the self himself,
entering it, as a man might enter his own seed,
Mr. Thrale had decided.
Plain, compressed
to a carpet upon the carpet, a human floor,
“I chuse it. I lie so a-purpose,” said Mr. Thrale.
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