When he protested, not too solemnly, <br />That for a world’s achieving maintenance <br />The crust of overdone divinity <br />Lacked aliment, they called it recreance; <br />And when he chose through his own glass to scan <br />Sick Europe, and reduced, unyieldingly, <br />The monk within the cassock to the man <br />Within the monk, they called it heresy. <br /> <br />And when he made so perilously bold <br />As to be scattered forth in black and white, <br />Good fathers looked askance at him and rolled <br />Their inward eyes in anguish and affright; <br />There were some of them did shake at what was told, <br />And they shook best who knew that he was right.<br /><br />Edwin Arlington Robinson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/erasmus/
