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. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...BETH GELERT; OR, THE GRAVE OF THE GREYHOUND by WILLIAM ROBERT SPENCER KNOWLEDGE by HENRY DAVID THOREAU SONNET WRITTEN IN THE FALL OF 1914: 4 by GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY SONG OF SEID NIMETOLLAH OF KUHISTAN by AMIR NURU'D-DIN NI'MATU'LLAH PEARLS OF THE FAITH: 5. ALLAH-AL-KUDDUS by EDWIN ARNOLD NIGHT BLOSSOMING by JANICE BLANCHARD MEDITATIONS FOR EVERY DAY IN PASSION WEEK: SATURDAY by JOHN BYROM PARAPHRASE OF PSALM 46. HEXAMETERS by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE |