Darwinian

Sorrow is ineluctable, not just Among ourselves. The doctor he was meant To be could never mitigate so much, The stunted children in the factories, The famished street-walker, the beggar who Was turned away with nothing from our doors. Within those doors the bullied and abandoned, The beaten child who cries himself to sleep And is afraid to wake.

    He felt them all Connected to him by an endless skein Clogging him like the gossamer of ropes With which the swarming Lilliputians held Poor Gulliver, who had to get away. The Beagle proved to be the quiet place, His sober, meditative sanctuary; But even so they had to put ashore. The great man grew indignant at the plight Of slaves and fulminated in his letters, Excoriating Christendom so-called That could so blithely countenance such cruelty.

And then there was the world of animals. Just how far down life’s ramifying tree Did all this go (the mourning elephant, Pack animals who drive the weakest out, His terrier, and the earthworms whom he tested To see if they were sensitive to sound . . .)? So that at times all life could seem to be A panoply of never-ending grief, Immense, implacable, and everywhere.

Strange how this man of tortured empathy So boundless it encompassed all the earth Should have his name usurped by social schemes Of conscious callousness and willed indifference.