And when you come home from a party,
From witticisms and meat, piquancy and fable,
In a rich order disciplined and hearty,
English is a cold room and a barren table.
No heat, no metrics, no light of rhyme,
The ear is starved of sonority and precision;
Ornament is covered by derision,
And gone is the accompaniment of time.
From hunger artists’ false asceticism,
Some beauty of a simmering cataclysm
Will bring to poesy out of inanition
A glint, a savor of a new aesthetic:
If not the resurrection of tradition,
Then doom and the crack of the hermetic.
Elsewhere starvation is not enshrined,
And while our own poetry is extinguished,
We look abroad and see where others have dined;
O my poor impoverished English.