Page:The Poems and Prose remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, volume 2 (1869).djvu/54



Is it true, ye gods, who treat us As the gambling fool is treated; O ye, who ever cheat us, And let us feel we're cheated! Is it true that poetical power, The gift of heaven, the dower Of Apollo and the Nine, The inborn sense, 'the vision and the faculty divine,' All we glorify and bless In our rapturous exaltation, All invention, and creation, Exuberance of fancy, and sublime imagination, All a poet's fame is built on, The fame of Shakespeare, Milton, Of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Is in reason's grave precision, Nothing more, nothing less, Than a peculiar conformation, Constitution, and condition Of the brain and of the belly? Is it true, ye gods who cheat us? And that 's the way ye treat us?

Oh say it, all who think it, Look straight, and never blink it! If it is so, let it be so, And we will all agree so; But the plot has counterplot, It may be, and yet be not.