| You’d stick the world into your bedside lane. It’s boredom makes you callous to all pain. To exercise your teeth for this strange task, A heart upon a rake, each day, you’d ask. Your eyes lit up like shopfronts, or the trees With lanterns on the night of public sprees, Make insolent misuse of borrowed power And scorn the law of beauty that’s their dower. Oh deaf-and-dumb machine, harm-breeding fool World sucking leech, yet salutary tool! Have you not seen your beauties blanch to pass Before their own reflection in the glass? Before this pain, in which you think you’re wise, Does not its greatness shock you with surprise, To think that Nature, deep in projects hidden, Has chosen you, vile creature of the midden, To knead a genius for succeeding time. O sordid grandeur! Infamy sublime! |
