“They called it Annandale-and I was there
To flourish, to find words, and to attend:
Liar, physician, hypocrite, and friend,
I watched him; and the sight was not so fair
As one or two that I have seen elsewhere:
An apparatus not for me to mend-
A wreck, with hell between him and the end,
Remained of Annandale; and I was there.
“I knew the ruin as I knew the man;
So put the two together, if you can,
Remembering the worst you know of me.
Now view yourself as I was, on the spot-
With a slight kind of engine. Do you see?
Like this … You wouldn’t hang me? I thought not.”
Diane Meredith writes:
I believe this poem is a physician’s testimony in front of a judge or jury
explaining why he had to euthanize his friend Annandale, who was nothing
but a wreck of a man with much suffering left to endure before death.
Believe? Nay, Madam, ’tis. I know not believe.
I believe this poem is a physician’s testimony in front of a judge or jury explaining why he had to euthanize his friend Annandale, who was nothing but a wreck of a man with much suffering left to endure before death.