(I)
I trace the warmth as it flees first from his feet
upward, always slightly behind -
life's retreat, the glacial subcutaneous encroachment.
I lay my ear against his once robust chest
and there the sick rattle, hollow, deflating,
the enervation of a once robust carriage,
bellowing merriment so late into the night.

(II)
The phantom rigadoon of those tavern nights,
where he would give forth, that ascendant wit
by the ambering hearth, the warmth of drink
and bawdy enjoyments, of which he was our conductor;
that warmth all but fled, the last crackle of the hearth
tucked away in its shadow the last of his epigrams.

(III)
Neither when he took ill or when his form stiffened
did young Harry makes his return.
There is no way to inter to the ground a giant,
even if now hollow and cold, mustaches drooped
upon a face now dried of the sweat of the final throes.
And at the moment when his spirit fled, the tides changed,
all fortunes indelibly marked.

(IV)
Titanic hero of our humble Tabard, draining glasses pale,
the tapsters hastened to fill him as he once did the air
with the jubilance known only to his metier, always voluminous
in quaffing and quipping.
His wit now withdrawn, only faces pale now,
including his own; no one is big enough to pay him
rightful homage, we who have sheltered in his shadow.
Now we all feel the cold coming on.

(V)
I have taken cloth to gingerly clean his rounded form,
and ensconced him in his final shroud.
By the morrow, he will be taken under wing and rested
in his last bed to sleep off his own death, nested there
in the camber of consecrated earth.
Only he knew best, that massive hill of flesh,
life's comedy and death as comedy, too.
That model of men in their real everydayness,
the burlesque of us all, amplified and concentrated in one body.
His candor refreshes, named Oldcastle, Cobham or no,
a liar, a craven and disloyal man, quite openly so.