By now it is quite dark outside. Or is the darkness his alone? He does not know. His mind ranges across his life, his huge hopes – for himself, for mankind – and their huge failure, which somehow at this moment of departure does not seem quite so huge. Fantastic images spin across his brain and instinctively he reaches out to them and tries to trap them in a net of words. Now he is seeing death, not on the slab, not on the stage, not on the printed page, but real and active and standing before him, rendering all those thousand of words he has used to describe it sadly inadequate – shards of a broken glass, ashes of an incinerated painting, echoes of a distant music. If only he could raise his pen now, he might after all be more than a good poet, he might be a great one.
Is it too late? Who knows? Can death take a joke as well as make one?
His lips part, his collapsing lungs strive to uncrease thernselves and take in that rich and healing air which he knows can revive him, but his strength has gone. Death's jest is complete.
So Thomas Lovell Beddoes exhales his last breath bearing his last words.
'Fetch the cow… fetch the cow…'