Toads
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my
life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive
the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its
sickening poison ¾
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out
of proportion.
Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers,
lispers,
Losels,° loblolly-men,°
louts scoundrels; bumpkins
They don't
end as paupers;
Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires
in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines ¾
They seem
to like it.
Their nippers° have
got bare feet, children
Their
unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets — and yet
No one
actually starves.
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams
are made on;
For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in
me, too;
Its hunkers° are heavy as hard luck, haunches
And cold as
snow,
And will never allow me to blarney
My way to
getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one
sitting.
I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual
truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you
have both.
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)