Classic Poem

I'm all for Backs then (though it is Fronts I sing) —
All for them inasmuch as frontness does spring
From this behindness, just as in mirrors all
That you perceive springs from their mercury wall —
Without that opaque backing of their glass
No reflex phantom would start out at us. —
To keep a calm sough, a peace-in-our-time pipe
Gushing a sodden cloud, the Toby-type,
Above a pot of mildly befuddling hops,
Propped up unbuttoned in the shoppiest of back-shops,
Of a nation-of-shopkeepers — with an eye to the main chance
(Not both eyes to it, as in closefisted France),
Where Time is Money , yes, but takes a nap
Sometimes, and Money even relaxes in Plenty's lap —
In a word, Old England, I'm for that every time —
Though recognizing that the once clear image is dim,
Aware, of course, that the surfaces are cracked,
A thought concave, needing badly to be rebacked,
That all the colour has left it — that it does swing,
Even, in a strange bias upward, the under-thing
Displacing the true continents of the top
(The upper thing) so that the things-of-the-Back outcrop —
Suffering a great reversal not unlike that
Of the upended cosmos (the vacant and flat
Supposed negation of the Antipodes)
Sketched by Montsurry in the first of the Bussys ,
Her Back gnawed through with fantasies, you see
" How she is riveted with hypocrisy"!