Classic Poem

I HEARD a little poet cry
With atheist passion to the sky:

Earth is a dung-ball that men push
Down a path of space, eating the while!
It is a blasphemous word in the curse
Of the universe, at bottom vile!
It is a dead God's skull still warm
On which we wormy creatures swarm!
A drying skull that very soon
Will be as desert as the moon!

I heard him thus vaunt high his spleen,
Then saw him for admirers preen
His plumes—the while he was echoing,
‘Yes, poetry is a divine thing!’