In our morale must lie our strength: So, that we may behold at length Routed Apollo's Battalions melt away like fog, Keep well the Hermetic Decalogue, Which runs as follows:- Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases, Thou shalt not write thy doctor's thesis On education, Thou shalt not worship projects nor Shalt thou or thine bow down before Administration. Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon World-Affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit With statisticians nor commit A social science. Thou shalt not be on friendly terms With guys in advertising firms, Nor speak with such As read the Bible for its prose, Nor, above all, make love to those Who wash too much. Thou shalt not live within thy means Nor on plain water and raw greens. If thou must choose Between the chances, choose the odd; Read The New Yorker, trust in God; And take short views.
1946
A Walk After Dark
A cloudless night like this Can set the spirit soaring: After a tiring day The clockwork spectacle is Impressive in a slightly boring Eighteenth-century way. It soothed adolescence a lot To meet so shameless a stare; The things I did could not Be so shocking as they said If that would still be there After the shocked were dead. Now, unready to die But already at the stage When one starts to resent the young, I am glad those points in the sky May also be counted among The creatures of Middle-age. It's cosier thinking of night As more an Old People's Home Than a shed for a faultless machine, That the red pre-Cambrian light Is gone like Imperial Rome Or myself at seventeen. Yet however much we may like The stoic manner in which The classical authors wrote, Only the young and the rich Have the nerve or the figure to strike The lacrimae rerum note. For the present stalks abroad Like the past and its wronged again Whimper and are ignored, And the truth cannot be hid; Somebody chose their pain, What needn't have happened did. Occurring this very night
