[New-Poetry] Toads

[TheOldMole]

And, of course, Larkin:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts-
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually _starves_.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.



Mccall, Steven NAVAIR wrote:
> Keats also mentions toads in his essay "The Philosophy of Shelley's
> Poetry" as follows:
>
> "In "Prometheus Unbound" he sees, as in the ecstasy of a saint, the
> ships moving among the seas of the world without fear of danger
>
>  	              by the light
> Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
> And music soft, 	 
>
> and poison dying out of green things, and cruelty out of all living
> things, and even the toads and efts [newts] becoming beautiful, and at
> last Time being borne "to his tomb in eternity.""
>
> Not a very sexy quote.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> [mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of David Graham
> Sent: Monday, July 02, 2007 14:59
> To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views
> Subject: [New-Poetry] Toads
>
>
>
> On Jul 2, 2007, at 2:46 PM, Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> 	The toads are a quotation from a Yeats essay, actually, and I
> once read it in the essay of its origin, but never was able to find it
> again.
>
> 	--Bob G. 
>
> ==============
>
> I'm skeptical.  The phrase "literalists of the imagination" Moore
> ascribes to Yeats, but not the toads.  She was typically very scrupulous
> about acknowledging her borrowings.  
>
> The Yeats is from *Ideas of Good and Evil*:  "The limitation of his view
> was from the very intensity of his vision; he was a too literal realist
> of imagination, as others are of nature...."  He's discussing Blake's
> illustrations of Dante.
>
>
>
>
> ========================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>
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-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/