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The Poet and the Woodlouse

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

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 collaps'd,

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