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Caterpillars

Topics: classic

Of caterpillars Fabre tells how day after day     Around the rim of a vast earth pot they crawled,     Tricked thither as they filed shuffling out one morn     Head to tail when the common hunger called.     Head to tail in a heaving ring day after day,     Night after slow night, the starving mommets crept,     Each following each, head to tail, day after day,     An unbroken ring of hunger, then it was snapt.     I thought of you, long-heaving, horned green caterpillars,     As I lay awake. My thoughts crawled each after each,     Crawling at night each after each on the same nerve,     An unbroken ring of thoughts too sore for speech.     Over and over and over and over again     The same hungry thoughts and the hopeless same regrets,     Over and over the same truths, again and again     In a heaving ring returning the same regrets.

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"Of caterpillars Fabre tells how day after day..."

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"The Text is taken from Percy's Reliques (1765), vol. i. p. 71, 'given from two MS. copies, transmitted from Scotland.' Herd had a very similar bal"

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"Away, away--     Through that strange void and vas..."

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