XVIII Dead Language
‘Thou dost not wisely, Bard.
A double voice is Truth’s, to use at will:
One, with the abysmal scorn of good for ill,
Smiting the brutish ear with doctrine hard,
Wherein She strives to look as near a lie
As can comport with her divinity;
The other tender-soft as seem
The embraces of a dead Love in a dream.
These thoughts, which you have sung
In the vernacular,
Should be, as others of the Church’s are,
Decently cloak’d in the Imperial Tongue.
Have you no fears
Lest, as Lord Jesus bids your sort to dread,
Yon acorn-munchers rend you limb from limb,
You, with Heaven’s liberty affronting theirs!’
So spoke my monitor; but I to him,
‘Alas, and is not mine a language dead?’