Classic Poem

And why so coffined in this vile disguise,
Which who but sees blasphemes thee with his eyes?
My twins of light within their pent-house shrink,
And hold it their allegiance to wink.
Oh, for a state-distinction to arraign
Charles of high treason 'gainst my sovereign.
What an usurper to his prince is wont--
Cloister and shave him--he himself hath don't.
His muffled fabric speaks him a recluse,
His ruins prove it a religious house.
The sun hath mewed his beams from off his lamp,
And majesty defaced the royal stamp.
Is't not enough thy dignity's in thrall,
But thou'lt transcribe it in thy shape and all?
As if thy blacks were of too faint a die
Without the tincture of tautology.
Flay an Egyptian for his cassock skin
Spun of his country's darkness, line't within
With Presbyterian budge, that drowsy trance,
The Synod's sable, foggy ignorance:
Nor bodily nor ghostly negro could
Rough cast thy figure in a sadder mould.
This Privy Chamber of thy shape would be
But the close mourner to thy royalty.
Then break the circle of thy tailor's spell,
A pearl within a rugged oyster's shell.
Heaven, which the minster of thy person owns,
Will fine thee for dilapidations.
Like to a martyred abbey's coarser doom,
Devoutly altered to a pigeon room,
Or like the college by the changeling rabble,
Manchester's elves, transformed into a stable,
Or if there be a profanation higher:
Such is the sacrilege of thine attire,
By which th'art half deposed. Thou look'st like one
Whose looks are under sequestration,
Whose renegado form at the first glance
Shows like the Self-Denying Ordinance.
Angel of light, and darkness too, I doubt,
Inspired within, and yet possessed without.
Majestic twilight in the state of grace,
Yet with an excommunicated face:
Charles and his mask are of a different mint,
A psalm of mercy in a miscreant print.
The sun wears midnight, day is beetle-browed,
And lightning is in keldar of a cloud.
Oh the accursed stenography of fate!
The princely eagle shrunk into a bat.