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Title: The Spectator
Author: Edmund Vance Cooke [
More Titles by Cooke]
Look at the man with the crown
Weighing him down.
Plumed and petted,
Galled and fretted!
Why do you eye him askance
With a quiver of hate in your glance?
Why not conceive him as human,
Nursed at the breast of a woman,
Growing, mayhap, as he could,
Not as he would?
How are you sure you would be
Better and wiser than he?
Look at the woman whose eye
Follows you by.
Silked and satined,
Scented, fattened!
Why does the half smile slip
Into a sneer on your lip?
You pity her? Ah, but the fashion
Of your complacent compassion.
Pity her! yet you have said,
"Better the creature were dead.
What is there left here for her
But to err?"
Thus would you make the world right,
Hiding its ills from your sight.
Look at the man with the pack
Breaking his back.
Ragged, squalid,
Wretched, stolid.
And you are sorry, you say,
(Much as you are at a play.)
But do you say to him, "Brother,
Twin-born son of our mother
What were the word, or the deed
Fitting your need?"
Or, as he slouches by,
Do you breathe "God be praised, I am I?"
[The end]
Edmund Vance Cooke's poem: Spectator
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