Here are the first three pages of Robert Penn Warren's Brother to Dragons, in which Jefferson discusses how the Declaration seems to him after a century and a half in the grave. I haven't managed to bring over all the stanza breaks from the pdf I took this text from, but you'll get the point, especially that moment when he compares the Declaration to the Minotaur. Notice that RPW himself only gets in a couple of lines, barely nudging the flow of Jefferson's tirade.
My name is Jefferson. Thomas. I
Lived. Died. But
Dead, cannot lie down in the
Dark. Cannot, though dead, set
My mouth to the dark stream that I may unknow
All my knowing. Cannot, for if,
Kneeling in that final thirst, I thrust
Down my face, I see come glimmering upward,
White, white out of the absolute dark of depth,
My face. And it is only human.
Have you ever tried to kiss that face in the mirror?
Or—ha, ha—has it ever tried to kiss you? Well,
You are only human. Is that a boast?
R.P.W
Well, I’ve read your boast
Cut in stone, on the mountain, off in Virginia.
JEFFERSON
What else had I in age to cling to,
Even in the face of knowledge?
I tried to bring myself to say:
Knowledge is only incidental, hope is all—
Hope, a dry acorn, but some green germ
May split it yet, then joy and the summer shade.
Even after age and the tangle of experience
I still might—
Oh, grandeur green and murmuring instancy of leaf,
Beneath that shade we’ll shelter. So, in senility
And moments of indulgent fiction I might try
To defend my old definition of man.
In Philadelphia first it came, my heart
Shook, shamefast in glory, and I saw, I saw—
But I’ll tell you quietly, in system, what I saw.
In Philadelphia—delegates by accident, in essence men,
Marmosets in mantles, beasts in boots, parrots in pantaloons,
That is to say, men. Only ourselves, in the end,
Offal of history, tangents of our father’s pitiful lust
At midnight heat or dawn-bed ease of a Sunday.
Why should that fuddling glory,
The gasp and twitch of our begetting, seem
Pitiful? Is it not worthy of us?
Or we of it? Too much crowds in
To break the thread of discourse and make me forget
That irony is always, and only, a trick of light on the late landscape.
But what I had meant to say, we were only ourselves,
Packed with our personal lusts and languors, lost,
Every man-jack of us, in some blind alley, enclave,
Crank cul-de-sac, couloir, or corridor
Of Time. Or Self.
And in that dark, no thread,
Airy as breath by an Ariadne’s fingers forged—
No thread, and beyond some groped-at corner, hulked
In the dark, hock-deep in ordure, its beard
And shag foul-scabbed, and when the hoof heaves—
Listen!—the foulness sucks like mire.
He waits. He is the infamy of Crete.
He is the midnight’s enormity. And is
Our brother, our darling brother. And Pasipha¨e!
Dear mother, mother of all, poor Pasipha¨e—
Huddled and hutched in the cow’s hide,
Laced, latched, thonged up, and breathlessly ass-humped
For the ecstatic stroke.
What was your silence then?
Before the scream?
And through the pain, like a curtain split,
In your mind did you see some meadow green,
Some childhood haven, water and birdsong, and you a child?
The bull plunged. You screamed like a girl, and strove.
But the infatuate machine of your invention held.
Later they lifted you out and wiped
Foam from your lips in the dark palace.
We have not loved you less, poor Pasipha¨e.
Even if, after all, it was your own invention.
But no, God no!—I tell you my mother’s name was Jane.
She was Jane Randolph, born in England,
Baptized in the Parish of Shadwell, London.
Yes, what was I saying? Language betrays.
There are no words to tell Truth.
To begin again. When I to Philadelphia came
I knew what the world was. Oh, I wasn’t
That ilk of a fool! Then when I saw individual evil,
I rationally said, it is only provisional paradox
To resolve itself in Time. Oh, easy,
Plump-bellied comfort!
Philadelphia, yes. I knew we were only men,
Defined in our errors and interests. But I, a man too—
Yes, laugh if you will—stumbled into
The breathless awe of vision, saw sudden
On every face, face after face,
Bleared, puffed, lank, lean red-fleshed or sallow, all—
On all saw the brightness blaze,
And knew my own days,
Times, hopes, horsemanship, respect of peers,
Delight, desire, and even my love, but straw
Fit for the flame, and in that fierce combustion, I—
Why, I was nothing, nothing but joy,
And my heart cried out:
“Oh, this is Man!”
And thus my minotaur. There at the blind
Labyrinthine turn of my personal time—
What do they call it? Yes,
Nel mezzo del cammin—yes, then met
The beast, in beauty masked. And the time
I met it was—at least, it seems so now—
That moment when the first alacrity
Of blood stumbles, and all natural joy
Sees Nature but as a mirror for its natural doom.
And so to hold joy you must deny mere Nature, and leap
Beyond man’s natural bourne and constriction
To find justification in a goal
Hypothesized in Nature.
Well, thus the infatuate encounter. But
No beast then, the towering
Definition, angelic, arrogant, abstract,
Greaved in glory, thewed with light, the bright
Brow tall as dawn.
I could not see the eyes.
So seized the pen, and in the upper room,
With the excited consciousness that I was somehow
Rectified, annealed, my past annulled
And fate confirmed, wrote. And far off,
In darkness, the watch called out.
Time came, we signed the document, went home.
I had not seen the eyes of that bright apparition.
I had been blind with light.
I did not know its eyes were blind.
The fat was in the fire.
And I who once said, all liberty
Is bought with blood, must now say,
All truth is bought with blood, and the blood is ours,
But only the truth can make us free—
Free from the fool lie.
And doom is always domestic, it purrs like a cat,
And the absolute traitor lurks in some sweet corner of the blood.
Therefore I walk and wake, and cannot die.