(A poem by William Wordsworth)
Send this man to the mine, this to the battle,
Famish an aged beggar at your gates,
And let him die by inches- but for worlds
Lift not your hand against him- Live, live on,
As if this earth owned neither steel nor arsenic,
A rope, a river, or a standing pool.
Live, if you dread the pains of hell, or think
Your corpse would quarrel with a stake- alas
Has misery then no friend?- if you would die
By license, call the dropsy and the stone
And let them end you- strange it is;
And most fantastic are the magic circles
Drawn round the thing called life- till we have learned
To prize it less, we ne’er shall learn to prize
The things worth living for.
William Wordsworth was England’s Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850. He was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, pioneered the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads.