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Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth

Chapter 34: CAMELUS SALTAT: Continued.
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About This Book

A varied collection of lyrics and sonnets that celebrates the sensory life of earth while probing larger moral and philosophical questions. Poems evoke woodlands, meadows, and pastoral music, employ classical and mythic allusion, and meditate on love, change, and the tension between wild impulse and cultivated wisdom. Ballads and shorter lyrics supply narrative motion and vivid imagery; sonnets compress reflective argument about time, art, and the self. The overall tone moves between exuberant celebration and guarded instruction, using musical diction and dense metaphor to connect natural perception with human feeling and ethical awareness.

CAMELUS SALTAT: Continued.

Oracle of the market! thence you drew
The taste which stamped you guide of the inept.—
A north-sea pilot, Hildebrand yclept,
A sturdy and a briny, once men knew.
He loved small beer, and for that copious brew,
To roll ingurgitation till he slept,
Rations exchanged with flavour for the adept:
And merrily plied him captain, mate and crew.
At last this dancer to the Polar star
Sank, washed out within, and overboard was pitched,
To drink the sea and pilot him to land.
O captain-critic! printed, neatly stitched,
Know, while the pillory-eggs fly fast, they are
Not eggs, but the drowned soul of Hildebrand.