Rats

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your Cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.

---------Isaac Rosenberg

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
What makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

--------Robert Burns, To a Mouse

The rat is in the trap, it is in the trap,
And attacking heaven and earth with a mouthful
of screeches like torn tin,

An effective gag.
when it stops screeching, it pants.

And cannot think.
'This has no face, it must be God' or

'No answer is also an answer.'
Iron jaws, strong as the whole earth.

Are stealing its backbone
For a crumpling of the Universe with screechings,

For supplanting every human brain inside is skull with a
rat-body that knots and unknots....

'Stay' says the arrangement of stars
Forcing the rat's head down into godhead

The heaven shudders, a flame unrolled like a whip,
And the stars jolt in their sockets.
and the sleep-soul of eggs
Wince under the shot of shadow-

That was the Shadow of the Rat
Crossing into power
Never to be buried

The horned Shadow of the rat
Casting here by the door
A bloody gift for the dogs

While it supplants Hell.

------Ted Hughes.