Post by antonio449 on Dec 23, 2006 0:15:35 GMT -5
A Chestertonian Ode
Once long ago on the shores of Dover
there lived a man in a box.
"Here, here I am going away," he announced
one morn, the sky egg-shell gray.
"Goodbye world,
so long sunshine, and all.
I'm going away, the time is nigh,
the seers in lab-coats have decried it.
'tis fitting and meet right as they say
to wave my hand at fancy,
and bid farewell to childish airs
since the whole world
is like lead or hardened clay.
For in the beginning was death,
and lifeless we remain.
Hark! Away I go my friends,
forever after to bend my mind to matter."
With that he waved his hand and entered the box
and remains there to this day.
You might know him as he sends missive from his boxy abode
pronouncing dead the hope of man.
And as he cannot see the sky
but only stares at planks of board,
his position on matters metaphysical is but moot.
Still he goes on, in his Britannic temper,
thinking Russell the pinnacle of philosophy,
he founds his Secular Humanism
content to play it blind against the boards,
without windows to the stars beyond.
I happened upon him one summer’s day and asked:
“But what of More and Newman?
What of Bede?”
"Oh, tiresome poet, they are nothing but phantoms,
griffins of their age drown in time's deluge."
"And yet a griffin," I explained,
a creature part eagle, part lion,
has wings
and with them I'll fly along the very shoals of time."
And there our friend remains,
trapped in the box he had made,
unable to budge a saucer.
Once long ago on the shores of Dover
there lived a man in a box.
"Here, here I am going away," he announced
one morn, the sky egg-shell gray.
"Goodbye world,
so long sunshine, and all.
I'm going away, the time is nigh,
the seers in lab-coats have decried it.
'tis fitting and meet right as they say
to wave my hand at fancy,
and bid farewell to childish airs
since the whole world
is like lead or hardened clay.
For in the beginning was death,
and lifeless we remain.
Hark! Away I go my friends,
forever after to bend my mind to matter."
With that he waved his hand and entered the box
and remains there to this day.
You might know him as he sends missive from his boxy abode
pronouncing dead the hope of man.
And as he cannot see the sky
but only stares at planks of board,
his position on matters metaphysical is but moot.
Still he goes on, in his Britannic temper,
thinking Russell the pinnacle of philosophy,
he founds his Secular Humanism
content to play it blind against the boards,
without windows to the stars beyond.
I happened upon him one summer’s day and asked:
“But what of More and Newman?
What of Bede?”
"Oh, tiresome poet, they are nothing but phantoms,
griffins of their age drown in time's deluge."
"And yet a griffin," I explained,
a creature part eagle, part lion,
has wings
and with them I'll fly along the very shoals of time."
And there our friend remains,
trapped in the box he had made,
unable to budge a saucer.