This poem is taken from PN Review 28, Volume 9 Number 2, November - December 1982.

Second Death

Robert Conquest

(Biographies)

A ten-pound Life will give you every fact
-Facts that he'd hoped his friends would not rehearse
To a condign posterity which lacked
Nothing of moment, since it had his verse.

Or so he thought. But now we come to read
What his more honest prudence had held in:
Tasteless compulsion into trivial deed,
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