Even if, let’s say, his basic game in life
Was to possess his cake and eat it too –
That is, to lay at will a faithful wife
And with dark ladies cock a doodle do;
To be a sentimental, loyal papist
When Protestants weren’t giving him the nose;
A neo-pagan, Venus-struck escapist
Should this help beat his rivals at the Rose –
Time and posterity would see not guilt,
Nor let tart Puritans his soul dispute:
For as did Christ, by whom a world was built,
This mortal man brought forth eternal fruit.
Doomed are those artists that fail thus to rise;
The ego is their muse, their crop its lies.
Jerusalem
3 December 2004