Why should I let the toad work <br />Squat on my life? <br />Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork <br />And drive the brute off? <br /> <br />Six days of the week it soils <br />With its sickening poison - <br />Just for paying a few bills! <br />That's out of proportion. <br /> <br />Lots of folk live on their wits: <br />Lecturers, lispers, <br />Losers, loblolly-men, louts- <br />They don't end as paupers; <br /> <br />Lots of folk live up lanes <br />With fires in a bucket, <br />Eat windfalls and tinned sardines- <br />They seem to like it. <br /> <br />Their nippers have got bare feet, <br />Their unspeakable wives <br />Are skinny as whippets - and yet <br />No one actually _starves_. <br /> <br />Ah, were I courageous enough <br />To shout, Stuff your pension! <br />But I know, all too well, that's the stuff <br />That dreams are made on: <br /> <br />For something sufficiently toad-like <br />Squats in me, too; <br />Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck, <br />And cold as snow, <br /> <br />And will never allow me to blarney <br />My way of getting <br />The fame and the girl and the money <br />All at one sitting. <br /> <br />I don't say, one bodies the other <br />One's spiritual truth; <br />But I do say it's hard to lose either, <br />When you have both.<br /><br />Philip Larkin<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/toads/
