The Death Of 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.