As often as he let himself be seen We pitied him, or scorned him, or deplored¹ The inscrutable profusion² of the Lord Who shaped as one of us a thing so mean —— Who made him human when he might have been A rat, and so been wholly in accord With any other creature we abhorred³ As always useless and not always clean.

    Now he is hiding all alone somewhere, And in a final hole not ready then； For now he is among those over there Who are not coming back to us again. And we who do the fiction of our share Say less of rats and rather more of men.