Cry Faugh!

Caria and Philistia considered
Only pre-marital adventures wise;
The bourgeois French argue contrariwise.

Socrate and Plato burked the issue
(Namely, how man-and-woman love should be)
With homosexual ideology.

Apocalyptic Israelites, foretelling
The Imminent End, called only for a chaste
Sodality: all dead below the waist.

Curious, various, amoral, moral -
Confess, what elegant square or lumpish hamlet
Lives free from nymphological disquiet?

"Yet males and females of the lower species
Contrive to eliminate the sexual problem,"
Scientists ponder: "Why not learn from them?"

Cry faugh! on science, ethics, metaphysics,
On antonyms of sacred and profane -
Come walk with me, love, in a golden rain

Past toppling colonnades of glory,
The moon alive on each uptilted face:
Proud remnants of a visionary race.

		Robert Graves