This is the locust season of our days
When the ripe meadows of the mind are bare,
This is the month of the never-born maize
Upon whose golden meats we shall not fare.
This is the week of the stunted stalk
And fruit that is dust on the bones of rock,
This is the day of the hungry hawk
And the songbirds dead by the fallen flock.
This is the noon of our derelict plain,
The sun-parched hour of most desolate pain.

Yet there is a valley where sweet grain grows
In strong-rooted stands, in tall splendid rows.
Here toiled in the meadows a man wise and serene,
And the meadows bore fruit and the meadows are green.

– Edward Murray Case, ‘In Memoriam: Ernst Cassirer’, in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp; Library of Living Philosophers, 6. Evanston: George Banta Publishing Company, 1949), 40.