Poem by George Meredith

A Certain People

As Puritans they prominently wax,
And none more kindly gives and takes hard knocks.
Strong psalmic chanting, like to nasal cocks,
They join to thunderings of their hearty thwacks.
But naughtiness, with hoggery, not lacks
When Peace another door in them unlocks,
Where conscience shows the eyeing of an ox
Grown dully apprehensive of an Axe.
Graceless they are when gone to frivolousness,
Fearing the God they flout, the God they glut.
They need their pious exercises less
Than schooling in the Pleasures: fair belief
That these are devilish only to their thief,
Charged with an Axe nigh on the occiput. 

1. Modern Love. Sonnet 38. Give to Imagination
2. Unknown Fair Faces
3. Modern Love. Sonnet 40. I Bade my Lady Think what She Might Mean
4. Modern Love. Sonnet 16. In our Old Shipwrecked Days
5. Empdeocles

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