Classic Poem

From all temptation of the devil:
From all the mud of life set free:
From worldly strife, and (subtler evil)
All tender-sex bewitchery:
Immune it stands, in splendour girt
With meadows held in lasting fee;
The fire of life without the dirt:
A junior monastery.

Straight from their mothers' breasts they flock,
The sons of English gentlemen:
Of Britain's fairest wheat a shock
To grind and mix and knead with leaven;
Till ripe for manhood they depart,
Secure against the deadly seven,
Immaculately fit to start
The primrose way to Heaven.

O sheltered cloister, at your door
Indeed I see the deadly ones!
Effeminacy you abhor:
You ask for manhood of your sons;
You think that bravery consists
In frequent use of dummy guns:
That manhood is a thing of fists,
Or what a youngster shuns.

Here learn. Of manhood's arch the key
You build without is womanhood;
And what you build is cruelty:
The strength that is not strong for good.
The youthful impulses you scorn
And trample on will raise a brood,
And children's children yet unborn
Will learn to curse what hath withstood
The badge by nature worn.

Your vaunted purity. It stands
A whiteness in a vacuum.
Shame is what follows your commands:
The seed of riot yet to come.
You teach of land as though the sea
That round its shores cries out were dumb;
The hemisphere where they will be,
You blot it with your thumb.

Perplexed and ignorant they troop
Beyond your bounds to meet the fact;
Unarmed, unguarded, at a swoop
The vandal hordes their tolls exact.
The village barmaid then imparts
The learning all your teaching lacked:
Her elementary school for hearts
Was certain to attract.

O reverend celibates, behold
Your work when sudden fires you see!
The youth, nigh cassockéd and stoled,
Burning with lurid venery.
You took the sappy grass and raised
So proud a hay-rick for your fee—
It fired; and now you stand amazed
At such a mystery.

Because you deem the hardest task
A thing of no account to you,
And shirk the lesson 'neath a mask
Of pedantry (and “manhood” too),
In your monastic prison grow,
Instead of girls, the seven anew,
And from your hot-house do they blow
The fairest gardens through.