Requiem for a Dead Rat

Was going through some old files and found this poem, which I had written during my first year of the PhD program after I almost stepped on a dead rat during a blizzard. Man, did I have a lot of free time on my hands...either that, or grad school did a real number on my brain.

Requiem for a Dead Rat

Written in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet.* Also note the reference to Hobbes' Leviathan.

O poor dead rat found frozen down below,

what made you think to crawl into the street?

Your stiff gray corpse did bring to me great woe

when I looked down and saw you at my feet.

The frigid weather sealed your wretched fate;

it froze your whiskers and your six inch tail.

Though you appeared of solid build and weight,

this could not save you from the wintry gale.

Yet with your dark, untimely death, we see

that man is much the same as you, my friend.

We scamper 'round, in striving to be free

from lives so short and brutish to the end.

To you, dead rat, a requiem I sing.

So cruel and brief this life to which we cling.

*A Shakespearean sonnet is composed in iambic pentameter and, with a few exceptions, follows the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The sonnet is constructed from three four-line stanzas (called quatrains) and a final couplet. The beginning of the third quatrain marks the "volta", or the line in which the mood of the poem shifts, and the poet expresses a revelation or epiphany.