The Death Of Myth-Making

Two virtues ride, by stallion, by nag, To grind our knives and scissors: Lantern-jawed Reason, squat Common Sense, One courting doctors of all sorts, One, housewives and shopkeepers. The trees are lopped, the poodles trim, The laborer's nails pared level Since those two civil servants set Their whetstone to the blunted edge And minced the muddling devil Whose owl-eyes in the scraggly wood Scared mothers to miscarry, Drove the dogs to cringe and whine And turned the farmboy's temper wolfish, The housewife's, desultory.