Bird Parliament · 7 of 20

The Owl

Then from a Ruin where conceal’d he lay Watching his buried Gold, and hating Day, Hooted The Owl.—‘I tell you, my Delight Is in the Ruin and the Dead of Night Where I was born, and where I love to wone All my Life long, sitting on some cold stone Away from all your roystering Companies, In some dark Corner where a Treasure lies; That, buried by some Miser in the Dark, Speaks up to me at Midnight like a Spark; And o’er it like a Talisman I brood, Companion of the Serpent and the Toad. What need of other Sovereign, having found, And keeping as in Prison underground, One before whom all other Kings bow down, And with his glittering Heel their Foreheads crown?’

‘He that a Miser lives and Miser dies, At the Last Day what Figure shall he rise?’

A Fellow all his life lived hoarding Gold, And, dying, hoarded left it. And behold, One Night his Son saw peering through the House A Man, with yet the semblance of a Mouse, Watching a crevice in the Wall—and cried ‘My Father?’—‘Yes,’ the Musulman replied, ‘Thy Father!’—‘But why watching thus?’—‘For fear Lest any smell my Treasure buried here.’ ‘But wherefore, Sir, so metamousified?’ ‘Because, my Son, such is the true outside Of the inner Soul by which I lived and died.’