Plato thought nature but a spume that plays/Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;/Soldier Aristotle played the taws/Upon the bottom of a king of kings;/World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras/Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings/What a star sang and careless Muses heard:/Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird. /Both nuns and mothers worship images,/But those the candles light are not as those/That animate a mother's reveries,/But keep a marble or a bronze repose./And yet they too break hearts -- O presences/That passion, piety or affection knows,/And that all heavenly glory symbolise --/O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;