 | The Poems of Richard Watson Gilder |  |
400
AVARICE
They said, “God made him,” ah, the clean, great God!Perhaps! Even as He made the loathèd beast
Whose use is to take offal for his feast;
As He made viper and vermin or, at a nod,
Made hell, to do some necessary part
In His wide-stretched, inscrutable universe.
Yes, haply God imagined him for a curse,
A scourge, a vengeance; with slow, patient art
Him did He fashion cunningly; saying: “This
My sign and warning, to time's distant end,
That all a loveless life is may be known,
And desolate horror of pure avarice;
The world is his,—a world without a friend,—
Without one friend an honest man would own.”
| The Poems of Richard Watson Gilder | |