Classic Poem

Now it fell upon a day, that the Devil fell to play,
In his fine strategic way, with a Thinker's soul:
And he whispered, " What if you, as a good man and a true,
Were to make man's morals new, between pole and pole! "

At first the Thinker blushed; then ambitiously he flushed;
And the inspiration gushed from — there's One knows where.
And it ran to endless pages, full of rhetoric and rages,
And subsidiary sages found it rich and rare.

There was Muscovite Christology, Italian Criminology,
And Hilltop Anthropology, with blends galore:
Till the Wise Ones of the world thought the Decalogue downhurled,
And the Flag of Truth unfurled evermore, more, more.

They said war was very wrong, and one's land not worth a song,
And that married folk belong to the mattoid group:
That murder is but madness, and a hanging judge a sadness,
And the bitterest foe of gladness, a full pint stoup:

That the Sum of Things has come from the Sucking of the Thumb
Of a kind of Sort of Something not clearly known:
That the Sum of Things is going to a Somewhat beyond knowing,
Unto Which is clearly owing, what is not Its own.

In the name of This and That they laid it down quite flat,
That the Law of Tit for Tat does not hold one bit:
You can do just what you please, at your leisure and sweet ease,
'Tis the Something's own decrees — you've no part in it.

And the Devil thought with glee, " They are on the way to me,
Or the deep, deep sea, which is much the same:
For the jargon of their jaw has proclaimed a fatal flaw
In the heart of every Law — just my own old claim. "

So the Thinkers and their crew made morality anew,
Setting everything askew by enlightened Thought:
And they cried in glad consist'ry, " This is epoch-making hist'ry!
We have mastered every mist'ry, and Salvation wrought. "

But their excellent intentions, and remarkable inventions,
To a place of four dimensions turned the earth: and lo!
There was neither wrong nor right, there was neither black nor white,
There was neither day nor night, neither yes nor no.

And the glorious muddle grew, till the Devil himself looked blue;
There was nothing he could do, and his keen face fell:
With so strange a bag of tricks, he felt wholly in a fix;
For mankind were heretics both to Heaven and Hell.

'Tis a melancholy story — but the Thinkers and their glory
Went to neither Purgatory, Hell nor Paradise.
For the earth which they'd bedevilled, and indecently dishevelled,
By the Thought wherein they revelled, and their Virtuous Vice,

Floated off into the Void of the Cosmic Unemployed,
And in Chaos it enjoyed a pure Nothingness.
But the Devil smiled: " Ere I will be fool enough to try
Such a trick again, I'll — why, strike me good, no less! "