Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE RAT, by EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE RAT, by                 Poet's Biography
First Line: As often as he let himself be seen
Last Line: Say less of rats and rather more of men.
Subject(s): Rats


As often as he let himself be seen
We pitied him, or scorned him, or deplored
The inscutable profusion of the Lord
Who shaped as one of us a thing so mean --
Who made him human when he might have been
A rat, and so been wholly in accord
With any other creature we abhorred
As always useless and not always clean.

Now he is hiding all alone somewhere,
And in a final hole not ready then;
For now he is among those over there
Who are not coming back to us again.
And we who do the fiction of our share
Say less of rats and rather more of men.




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