This Word Dec-a-dence

I have spent a great deal of time expending much mental energy,
pondering this ancient word, calculating in my mind the many
and various methods on how to formulate the very finest poetic
lines, which would best portray, without abatement or discomfiture
these three, individually, unpretentious syllables, to you, my good friends.

Combined they conjure up a potent and abhorrent image on the
most detested form of human thought and behavior,
which is directed at the lowest outcome of our nature.
Moral, social and personal decay, brought about by
seeking uninterrupted and excessive, immoral indulgence.

Yet, when I studied further those explanations within
the hallowed covers of some excellent encyclopedia
devoted to the language of the English, I found locked
therein a journey back in time to lands so far removed
from that lexicon, I thought anew about my task.

This word then dispatched me to the most serene of places
for my disturbed imaginings, therein to perceive from
the muses of antiquity a lesson in its journey to our times.
Could not Cato, nor Cicero, nor Epictetus have given me a better time?
I would have been by far the wiser then to count its form anew.

Ah! Italia, my friends, ancient and bold Italia, in that place they knew well
how to say it keen and all the religious Latin I did learn at school
would not prepare me for its pollination to make of it
what now we do; this word to so describe such vile and demeaning
a thing as we humans could bring ourselves to act upon!

The French, they say invented a quaint description for its many
ungainly attributes; methinks the Romans by far outweigh
the diplomatic Gauls at making up a rambunctious triplet to
passionately display the core of this very base and unwholesome
set of characters. Let me tell you now in a few last lines its story.

You will know it is a noun: the process or manifestation of moral or
cultural decay. Far better it sounds this explanation: luxurious self-indulgence!
The origin I will share with thee; it’s said to come from the French decadence
And from Latin Decadentia; related to decay; you did not know don’t say!
Yet before all, from the low Latin this is how it made its way: de – down and cadere – to fall!

How apt I hear you say. To fall, to fall indeed and thus the story ran
Oh! How sorry am I, that ever a word on Decadence I began.

Adrian Kavanagh,
October 7, 2008.