Standardization

 When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age, 
The journalist with his marketable woes 
Fills up once more the inevitable page 
Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose; 

Whenever the green aesthete starts to whoop 
With horror at the house not made with hands 
And when from vacuum cleaners and tinned soup 
Another pure theosophist demands 

Rebirth in other, less industrial stars 
Where huge towns thrust up in synthetic stone 
And films and sleek miraculous motor cars 
And celluloid and rubber are unknown; 

When from his vegetable Sunday School 
Emerges with the neatly maudlin phrase 
Still one more Nature poet, to rant or drool 
About the "Standardization of the Race"; 

I see, stooping among her orchard trees, 
The old, sound Earth, gathering her windfalls in, 
Broad in the hams and stiffening at the knees, 
Pause and I see her grave malicious grin.
 

For there is no manufacturer competes 
With her in the mass production of shapes and things.
 
Over and over she gathers and repeats 
The cast of a face, a million butterfly wings.
 

She does not tire of the pattern of a rose.
 
Her oldest tricks still catch us with surprise.
 
She cannot recall how long ago she chose 
The streamlined hulls of fish, the snail's long eyes, 

Love, which still pours into its ancient mould 
The lashing seed that grows to a man again, 
From whom by the same processes unfold 
Unending generations of living men.
 

She has standardized his ultimate needs and pains.
 
Lost tribes in a lost language mutter in 
His dreams: his science is tethered to their brains, 
His guilt merely repeats Original Sin.
 

And beauty standing motionless before 
Her mirror sees behind her, mile on mile, 
A long queue in an unknown corridor, 
Anonymous faces plastered with her smile.

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