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 ons 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 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 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 collapsd,     While he makes his mundane music, and he will not stop, I think."