James Reeves: Bestiary

Happy the quick-eyed lizard that pursues

    Its creviced zigzag race

 Amid the epic ruins of a temple

    Leaving no trace.

 Happy the weasel in the moonlit churchyard

    Twisting a vibrant thread

 Of narrow life between the mounds that hide

    The important dead.

 Close to the complex fabric of their world

    The small beasts live who shun

 The spaces where the huge ones bellow, fight,

    And snore in the sun.

 How admirable the modest and the frugal,

    The small, the neat, the furtive.

 How troublesome the mammoths of the world,

    Gross and assertive.

 Happy should we live in the interstices

    Of a declining age,

 Even while the impudent masters of decision

    Trample and rage.

Published in The Imprisoned Sea (1949).  Reeves may be talking about himself here: he was an unspectacular presence, and associated with figures that mainstream poetry fashion has rarely been totally comfortable with. In fact, Reeves may be talking about all such poets: "the modest and the frugal".