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Working Class Hero.
"Song on Porcelain
Rosecolored cup and saucer,
Flowery demitasses:
You lie beside the river
Where an armored column passes.
Winds from across the meadow
Sprinkle the banks with down;
A torn apple tree’s shadow
Falls on the muddy path;
The ground everywhere is strewn
With bits of brittle froth—
Of all things broken and lost
Porcelain troubles me most.
Before the first red tones
Begin to warm the sky
The earth wakes up, and moans
At the small sad cry
Of cups and saucers cracking,
The masters’ precious dream
Of roses, of mowers raking
And shepherds on the lawn.
The black underground stream
Swallows the frozen swan.
This morning, as I walked past
The porcelain troubled me most.
The blackened plain spreads out
To where the horizon blurs
In a litter of handle and spout,
A lifelike pulp that stirs
And crunches under my feet.
Pretty, useless foam:
Your stained colors are sweet,
Spattered in dirty waves
Flecking the fresh black loam
In the mounds of these new graves.
In sorrow and pain and cost,
Sir, porcelain troubles me most."
--Czesław Miłosz, tr R Pinsky in The New Yorker
Burgess Unabridged.
"Ideas, new-born and naked original ideas, are acceptable at no time to the humanity they visit to help uplift it from the state of beast. In the England of that period original or unknown ideas were a smoking brimstone to the nose, dread Arabian afrites, invisible in the air, jumping out of vases, armed for the slaughter of the venerable and the cherished, the ivy clad and celestially haloed. They carried the dishevelled Maenad's torch. A step with them, and we were on the Phlegethon waters of the French Revolution. For a publication of simple ideas men were seized, tried at law, mulcted, imprisoned, and not pardoned after the term of punishment; their names were branded; the horned elect butted at them; he who alluded to them offered them up, wittingly or not, to be damned in the nose of the public for an execrable brimstone stench." --Lord Ormont and His Aminta
Lamb Has Harnessed a Wolf.
