Wittgenstein's Eyes Poem by Dennis Ryan

April 13,2006; revised on Sunday morning, February 10,2019 at 10: 35 a.m.

Wittgenstein's eyes were lost, lonely,
estranged—you see it in photographs.
His eyes felt everything—he wrote it down,
and called it philosophy.He witnessed men
kill one another in desperation, and that changed
everything for him; he watched Frank Ramsey die.
Why couldn't his eyes just lie, gloss over everything,
get the emotions right?They said, "to understand
a sentence is to understand a language."And then,
"to understand a language is to understand a way of life."
It all makes sense; I see things his way now:
you start with a sentence, then go from there.