VI

In the darkness (right Dickens) of Tom-All-Alone’s
  Or the Morgue out in Paris, where tragedy centuples
Life’s effects by Death’s algebra, Shakespeare (Malone’s)
  Might have said sleep was murdered—­new scholiasts have sent you pills
To purge text of him!  Bread? give me—­Scottice—­scones!

VII

Think, what use, when youth’s saddle galls bay’s back or roan’s,
  To seek chords on love’s keys to strike, other than his chords? 
There’s an error joy winks at and grief half condones,
  Or life’s counterpoint grates the C major of discords—­
’Tis man’s choice ’twixt sluts rose-crowned and queens age dethrones.

VIII

I for instance might groan as a bag-pipe groans,
  Give the flesh of my heart for sharp sorrows to flagellate,
Grief might grind my cheeks down, age make sticks of my bones,
  (Though a queen drowned in tears must be worth more than Madge elate)[1]
Rose might turn burdock, and pine-apples cones;

IX

My skin might change to a pitiful crone’s,
  My lips to a lizard’s, my hair to weed,
My features, in fact, to a series of loans;
  Thus much is conceded; now, you, concede
You would hardly salute me by choice, John Jones?

[Footnote 1:  First edition:—­ And my face bear his brand—­mine, that once bore Love’s badge elate!]

* * * * *

THE POET AND THE WOODLOUSE

Said a poet to a woodlouse—­“Thou art certainly my brother;
  I discern in thee the markings of the fingers of the Whole;
And I recognize, in spite of all the terrene smut and smother,
  In the colours shaded off thee, the suggestions of a soul.

“Yea,” the poet said, “I smell thee by some passive divination,
  I am satisfied with insight of the measure of thine house;
What had happened I conjecture, in a blank and rhythmic passion,
  Had the aeons thought of making thee a man, and me a louse.

“The broad lives of upper planets, their absorption and digestion,
  Food and famine, health and sickness, I can scrutinize and test;
Through a shiver of the senses comes a resonance of question,
  And by proof of balanced answer I decide that I am best.”

“Man, the fleshly marvel, alway feels a certain kind of awe stick
  To the skirts of contemplation, cramped with nympholeptic weight: 
Feels his faint sense charred and branded by the touch of solar caustic,
  On the forehead of his spirit feels the footprint of a Fate.”

“Notwithstanding which, O poet,” spake the woodlouse, very blandly,
  “I am likewise the created,—­I the equipoise of thee;
I the particle, the atom, I behold on either hand lie
  The inane of measured ages that were embryos of me.