A certain people

     As Puritans they prominently wax,
     And none more kindly gives and takes hard knocks. 
     Strong psalmic chanting, like to nasal cocks,
     They join to thunderings of their hearty thwacks. 
     But naughtiness, with hoggery, not lacks
     When Peace another door in them unlocks,
     Where conscience shows the eyeing of an ox
     Grown dully apprehensive of an Axe. 
     Graceless they are when gone to frivolousness,
     Fearing the God they flout, the God they glut. 
     They need their pious exercises less
     Than schooling in the Pleasures:  fair belief
     That these are devilish only to their thief,
     Charged with an Axe nigh on the occiput.

     The garden of Epicurus

     That Garden of sedate Philosophy
     Once flourished, fenced from passion and mishap,
     A shining spot upon a shaggy map;
     Where mind and body, in fair junction free,
     Luted their joyful concord; like the tree
     From root to flowering twigs a flowing sap. 
     Clear Wisdom found in tended Nature’s lap
     Of gentlemen the happy nursery. 
     That Garden would on light supremest verge,
     Were the long drawing of an equal breath
     Healthful for Wisdom’s head, her heart, her aims. 
     Our world which for its Babels wants a scourge,
     And for its wilds a husbandman, acclaims
     The crucifix that came of Nazareth.

     A later Alexandrian

     An inspiration caught from dubious hues
     Filled him, and mystic wrynesses he chased;
     For they lead farther than the single-faced,
     Wave subtler promise when desire pursues. 
     The moon of cloud discoloured was his Muse,
     His pipe the reed of the old moaning waste. 
     Love was to him with anguish fast enlaced,
     And Beauty where she walked blood-shot the dews. 
     Men railed at such a singer; women thrilled
     Responsively:  he sang not Nature’s own
     Divinest, but his lyric had a tone,
     As ’twere a forest-echo of her voice: 
     What barrenly they yearn for seemed distilled
     From what they dread, who do through tears rejoice.

     An Orson of the muse

     Her son, albeit the Muse’s livery
     And measured courtly paces rouse his taunts,
     Naked and hairy in his savage haunts,
     To Nature only will he bend the knee;
     Spouting the founts of her distillery
     Like rough rock-sources; and his woes and wants
     Being Nature’s, civil limitation daunts
     His utterance never; the nymphs blush, not he. 
     Him, when he blows of Earth, and Man, and Fate,
     The Muse will hearken to with graver ear
     Than many of her train can waken:  him
     Would fain have taught what fruitful things and dear
     Must sink beneath the tidewaves, of their weight,
     If in no vessel built for sea they swim.