The Alien

"There is a country in my mind,     Lovelier than a poet blind     Could dream of, who had never known     This world of drought and dust and st"

"Failing sometimes to understand     Why there are folk whose flesh should seem     Like carrion puffed with noisome steam,     Fly-blown to the"

"We judge by appearance merely:     If I can't think strangely, I can at least look queerly.     So I grew the hair so long on my head     That"

"Dear absurd child - too dear to my cost I've found -     God made your soul for pleasure, not for use:     It cleaves no way, but angled broad"

"Here morning in the ploughman's songs is met     Ere yet one footstep shows in all the sky,     And twilight in the east, a doubt as yet,     S"

"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"