AT THE PAUPER ASYLUM
WITH naked turf-plots three by six in symmetric precision spread
You see, between its walls of red, the graveyard of the lunatics.
No cenotaph or obelisk holds memory in graven speech;
Sole epitaph accorded each a number on a painted disk.
In nameless uniformity, with few to know and none to weep,
While space allows, their freehold keep the men that God has made awry.
And these within their straitened fold, who nothing owned, were owned of none,
Possess of all beneath the Sun what God and man could not withhold.
So close they lie, a skeleton might give his rotting friend a nudge
And say, “If you or I were judge, we should not moulder here alone.
“Lest we might harm our fellow-men, they prisoned us, and now exhaust,
To speed a cosmic holocaust, the blood and gold they grudged us then.
“The world had seen less misery with us for prince and presbyter,
Who sometimes knew the fools we were, and in our folly could not lie.
“But happier we who lived in scorn, and dying, passed from human thought
Than they whose sophistry has bought the curses of a race unborn.”
C. BURCHARDT
(MAGDALEN)