excerpt from The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed byt he Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of ...

Not a poem per se, but an excerpt from the play-written-mostly-in-verse, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade ("Marat/Sade"), by Peter Weiss. An elegy for Marat as given by Jacques Roux:

Woe to the man who is different
who tries to break down all the barriers
Woe to the man
who tries to stretch the imagination of man
He shall be mocked he shall be scourged

by the blinkered guardians of morality
You wanted enlightenment and warmth

and so you studied light and heat
You wondered how forces can be controlled

so you studied electricity
You wanted to know what man is for

so you asked yourself What is this soul

this dump for hollow ideals and mangled morals
You decided that the soul is in the brain
and that it can learn to think
For to you the soul is a practical thing

a tool for ruling and mastering life
And you came one day to the Revolution

because you saw the most important vision
That our circumstances must be changed

fundamentally
and without these changes

everything we try to do must fail

by Peter Weiss