The Great Hater

A Proposed Companion-piece to Rupert Brooke's "Great Lover"

JOHN PEALE BISHOP

I HAVE been so great a hater: found my days Filled full of things deserving hate's high praise And homage. Oh, I that have learned to hate Shall never want for pleasure; soon or late, I'll find things hateful while I have my breath, And when I die, I'll bite my thumb at Death. But that's anon. I now must set you down Things I have hated:

A certain shade of brown

Which elder ladies love; wet roofs that drip Their huge drops on your neck; short sheets that slip And leave your ankles freezing; fires that smoke; Carved, heavy furniture of varnished oak; The food of farmers, and their stupid talk; The feel of live wet fur; the shriek of chalk; The hum of Autumn's gnats; smell of closed rooms, And the rank breath of heavy dahlia blooms Kept three days longer than they should have been; White cups and plates, almost hut not quite clean; Lust in old men, coldness in the young; Cheap love-songs and the tunes to which they're sung: White moths which feast through long autumnal eves In chests and closets; books with uncut leaves; The hour of waking; late-seen gibbous moons; And sugar in which dull people thrust wet spoons; The loneliness of crowds, and the warm fret Of April nights when the fresh grasses set Youth and desire, night and still sleep at strife. . . . Death I have hated, and, sometimes, even Life.

All these which I have known, kept, hated well, I would set down, unchanged, unchangeable, Against that hour when I shall lightly run Along the windy pathways of the sun, A strangely free and unannoyed ghost, And start and turn and, finding I have lost All these my treasured hatreds, bow my head And tremble, knowing at length that I am dead.