theme,metaphor,work_id,dictionary,provenance,id,created_at,updated_at,reviewed_on,comments,text,context Ruling Passion,"""Human Nature's his show-box--your friend, would you know him? / Pull the string, Ruling Passion--the picture will show him.""",5709,"","Searching ""ruling passion"" in HDIS (Poetry)",15235,2004-05-20 00:00:00 UTC,2011-02-05 19:38:00 UTC,,•Great anti-metaphor poem. INTEREST.
•Included twice: once in Government and once in Uncategorized.,"Good Lord, what is Man! For as simple he looks,
Do but try to develop his hooks and his crooks!
With his depths and his shallows, his good and his evil,
All in all he's a problem must puzzle the Devil.

On his one ruling passion Sir Pope hugely labors,
That, like th'old Hebrew walking-switch, eats up its neighbours.
Human Nature's his show-box--your friend, would you know him?
Pull the string, Ruling Passion--the picture will show him.

What pity, in rearing so beauteous a system,
One trifling particular--Truth--should have miss'd him!
For, spite of his fine theoretic positions,
Mankind is a science defies definitions.

Some sort all our qualities each to its tribe,
And think Human Nature they truly describe:
Have you found this, or t'other? There's more in the wind,
As by one drunken fellow his comrades you'll find.
But such is the flaw, or the depth of the plan
In the make of that wonderful creature called Man,
No two virtues, whatever relation they claim,
Nor even two different shades of the same,
Though like as was ever twin brother to brother,
Possessing the one shall imply you've the other.
",Middle Stanzas