| Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935). Collected Poems. 1921. |
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| VII. The Three Taverns |
| 22. The Rat |
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| AS often as he let himself be seen | |
| We pitied him, or scorned him, or deplored | |
| The inscrutable profusion of the Lord | |
| Who shaped as one of us a thing so mean— | |
| Who made him human when he might have been | 5 |
| A rat, and so been wholly in accord | |
| With any other creature we abhorred | |
| As always useless and not always clean. | |
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| Now he is hiding all alone somewhere, | |
| And in a final hole not ready then; | 10 |
| For now he is among those over there | |
| Who are not coming back to us again. | |
| And we who do the fiction of our share | |
| Say less of rats and rather more of men. | |
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