As often as he let himself be seen <br />We pitied him, or scorned him, or deplored <br />The inscrutable profusion of the Lord <br />Who shaped as one of us a thing so mean— <br />Who made him human when he might have been <br />A rat, and so been wholly in accord <br />With any other creature we abhorred <br />As always useless and not always clean. <br /> <br />Now he is hiding all alone somewhere, <br />And in a final hole not ready then; <br />For now he is among those over there <br />Who are not coming back to us again. <br />And we who do the fiction of our share <br />Say less of rats and rather more of men.<br /><br />Edwin Arlington Robinson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-rat/
