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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Skipwith Cannéll

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

The Lean Gray Rats

Skipwith Cannéll

From “Songs of Hunger”

THE LEAN gray rats of hunger

Have gnawed my soul in twain;

Till cursing the God that made it,

The good half died in pain.

The ill half lived and prospered,

Waxed brutal and strong and fat;

But the good half died and was eaten

In hell by a lean, gray rat.