TO ROBERT OF THE FORCE.
Since first you loomed upon my infant ken
My firm belief has ever been, and still it is,
That you are fashioned not as other men
(Subject, at best, to mortal disabilities),
But come of more than human kin,
Immune, or practically so, from sin.
Godlike the poise that to your bearing lends
The aspect of a tower that never totters;
There's a divinity hath shaped your ends
(Rough-hewn, perhaps—especially your trotters);
Your ample chest, your generous girth
Have no precise similitude on earth.
I cannot picture you (though I have tried)
Wearing a bowler hat and tweed apparel,
Or craving sustenance for your inside
Drawn either from the oven or the barrel;
Scarcely you figure in my eye
As liable, in Nature's course, to die.
And it was you who almost fell from grace,
Striking, like Lucifer, against authority,
Leaving your Heaven for another place
Not mentioned by your ten-to-one majority,
And doomed, to your surprise and pain,
Never, like Lucifer, to rise again.
But you were wise, my Robert, wise in time;
And I, who set you far above humanity,
High-pedestalled upon my lofty rhyme,
Rejoice with you in your recovered sanity;
To me I feel it would have mattered
Enormously to see my idol shattered.
But 'ware the Bolsh, who fain would lure your feet
To conduct unbecoming in a copper;
Once you betrayed us, going off your beat,
And now you've nearly come another cropper;
If, tempted thrice, you break your trust,
You'll have no halo left to readjust.
O.S.