Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

It is an ancient story that some particular ichor

Runs through the branching tree of man marking the males

Eldest in each generation and having the self-same name.

Here is the Habsburg lip, there the aquiline head,

Here the charming improvidence of some sottish fair-haired

boy,

There the sharp edge of a Huxley, here the patience of Darwin

Weighing the cast of the worm, brassing a tune at the flowers,

Philoprogenitive Johann Sebastian or Carl Philip Emmanuel

Plucking the harpsichord, cracking the crotchets, twanging

toccatas,

And ploughing and scattering seed year after ripening year

For the greater glory of God and the mending of man's estate.

How strong they are, these giants, but there's a defeasible

claim

At the root or start of the argument, for it's a wise wise child

Who knows the father, this is why all the learned rabbis

With no dissentients say that the Jewish child or the Gentile

Is thus and thus from his mother's womb, not the wandering

seed

Of the father (whoever he be), and we know that now and

then

The stranger night-befallen, the urgent soldier, the prince

Ofa far country has entered the breach first made by another.

Shields and scutcheons, hatchments, parchments, smooth

obituaries,

You may most deeply deceive us, Burke, Almanach de

Gotha,

Brazen-clasped family Bible, the ink brown on the page-

All may stand askew in the scrutiny of that court

Where chromosomes, genes, all ultimate nodes are called to

account.

Each has his own bright nucleus drawn from the mother, the

father

Mysterious, far, king or serf, gold or copper;

J. M. CAMERON

Caesar cannot give judgment, either in Rome or the

provinces,

The frontiers are famished for men, soldiers, hands for the

harvest,

This is all Caesar knows, all that concerns the Palace.

THE WIZARDS

With subtle knowledge stronger as life withers

The old ones are to the young eye, they breathe

Blue fires of witchcraft, they know the word,

The operative word that breaks the heavens,

Justice, promises, the rib-cage, the skull.

The old eye to the old eye is sad,

Clouded, milky, words lack all distinction.

There's a bright boy, the lucky fellow

Rules the world-market-place, battlefield;

His sister's lovely, too. Why are the young so cruel?