Cyrano and "Cyrano"
(in the English "Alexandrine" verse style)

I’ve heard it said that Cyrano de Bergerac
wrote tales of other worlds that took us there and back
in our imaginations. Also, we’ve been told,
he authored plays and pamphlets impudent and bold
which featured criticisms of his century
with its antique religion and astronomy.

Yet Edmond Rostand, later, like some others, chose
to picture “Cyrano” as an enormous nose
attached to one who tried to overcompensate
with wit for unattractiveness. So, hardly great,
to say the least, was he at Love. For that, he would
require a proxy: someone else to do what could
evoke in whom he loved a love that filled his need,
although vicarious, for a romantic deed.

But for our made-up Hero fighting took first place
where losing blood in some way equaled saving face.
And as his death from wounds neared its appointed time,
the theft of just one thing did he lament as crime:
his pride, a large albino feather in his cap
about which none could ever make him shut his trap.
So if his final words, post mortem, we exhume
we’d hear not of his Love but, rather, “my white plume.”

So what are we to make of this? the reader asks.
What does this Frenchman have to do with routine tasks,
if anything? Perhaps as simply metaphor?
As history, as fiction, or romantic lore?
Does Cyrano suggest we think and “criticize”?
Or does a giant nostril urge us: “Fantasize!”
Should observation leading to new theories count?
Or do the “entertained” Reality surmount?
Imagination bridled, C. S. Peirce would say,
means Science; where Unbridled it leads minds astray.
At any rate, the Man and Myth have each their place.
Both Cyrano and “Cyrano,” proceed apace.