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 æons 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 stickTo 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 lieThe inane of measured ages that were embryos of me.

'I am fed with intimations, I am clothed with consequences,And the air I breathe is coloured with apocalyptic blush:Ripest-budded odours blossom out of dim chaotic stenches,And the Soul plants spirit-lilies in sick leagues of human slush.

'I am thrilled half cosmically through by cryptophantic surgings,Till the rhythmic hills roar silent through a spongious kind of blee:And earth's soul yawns disembowelled of her pancreatic organs,Like a madrepore if mesmerized, in rapt catalepsy.

'And I sacrifice, a Levite—and I palpitate, a poet;—Can I close dead ears against the rush and resonance of things?Symbols in me breathe and flicker up the heights of the heroic;Earth's worst spawn, you said, and cursed me? look! approve me! I have wings.

'Ah, men's poets! men's conventions crust you round and swathe you mist-like,And the world's wheels grind your spirits down the dust ye overtrod:We stand sinlessly stark-naked in effulgence of the Christlight,And our polecat chokes not cherubs; and our skunk smells sweet to God.

'For He grasps the pale Created by some thousand vital handles,Till a Godshine, bluely winnowed through the sieve of thunderstorms,Shimmers up the non-existent round the churning feet of angels;And the atoms of that glory may be seraphs, being worms.

'Friends, your nature underlies us and your pulses overplay us;Ye, with social sores unbandaged, can ye sing right and steer wrong?For the transient cosmic, rooted in imperishable chaos,Must be kneaded into drastics as material for a song.

'Eyes once purged from homebred vapours through humanitarian passionSee that monochrome a despot through a democratic prism;Hands that rip the soul up, reeking from divine evisceration,Not with priestlike oil anoint him, but a stronger-smelling chrism.

'Pass, O poet, retransfigured! God, the psychometric rhapsode,Fills with fiery rhythms the silence, stings the dark with stars that blink;All eternities hang round him like an old man's clothes collapsèd,While he makes his mundane music—and he will not stop, I think.'