Hymn For Humble People

|THE staunch and strenuous Serpent spends his time

`In the safe field of serpentine pursuits,

Rightly considering it a social crime

`To parody the ways of other brutes.=

Scorning the fraud of alien aspirations,

`The snobbishness that apes another class,

Proud, and yet conscious of his limitations,

`He bites the dust and grovels in the grass.=

The moral food that keeps him down is Force,

`Force to confine his fancies to their beds.

Makes him the laughing-stock of quadrupeds.=

No weak attempt to carol like the Lark,

`Fore-doomed to failure and to ridicule,

Troubles his life; he does not wish to bark,

`Has no desire to amble like a Mule.=

Having no legs he does not try to walk,

`But keeps contentedly his native crawl;

Having no voice he does not strive to talk,

`Much less to bellow or to caterwaul.=

Mark the inevitably reached result:

`To balance the advantages he missed,

In three departments he may yet exult

`To be the only perfect specialist.=

Three arts are his: to writhe, to hiss, to creep.

`The Toad's tenacity, the Wombat's wiles,

Or the keen cunning of the crafty Sheep

`(And all are artists in their various styles),=

Would vainly challenge them. He reigns supreme

`In these the fields of his activity,

And reigning so defies the envious Bream,

`Who sneers and shrugs and sniggers in the sea.=

Type of the wise, who roar but never foam

`(If they can help it) at the mouth, except

When night and morn they brush their teeth at home

`With pallid powder for that purpose kept.=