A Century of Parody and Imitation

by Unknown

THE POET AND THE WOODLOUSE

(E. B. BROWNING)

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 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.

'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 cursèd 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 passion

See 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.'