Porkopolis

Sow

• God knows how our neighbor managed to breed
• His great sow:
• Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid
•  
• In the same way
• He kept the sow--impounded from public stare,
• Prize ribbon and pig show.
•  
• But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour
• Through his lantern-lit
• Maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door
•  
• To gape at it:
• This was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling
• With a penny slot
•  
• For thrift children, nor dolt pig ripe for heckling,
• About to be
• Glorified for prime flesh and golden crackling
•  
• In a parsley halo;
• Nor even one of the common barnyard sows,
• MireRsmirched, blowzy,
•  
• Maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout —
• cruise--
• Bloat tun of milk
• On the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies
•  
• Shrilling her hulk
• To halt for a swig at the pink teats. No. This vast
• Brobdingnag bulk
•  
• Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black
• compost,
• Fat-rutted eyes
• Dream-filmed. What a vision of ancient hoghood
• must
•  
• Thus wholly engross
• The great grandam!--our marvel blazoned a knight,
• Helmed, in cuirass,
•  
• Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat
• By a grisly-bristled
• Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow's heat.
•  
• But our farmer whistled,
• Then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape,
• And the green-copse-castled
•  
• Pig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop,
• Slowly, grunt
• On grunt, up in the flickering light to shape
•  
• A monument
• Prodigious in gluttonies as that hog whose want
• Made lean Lent
•  
• Of kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,
• Proceeded to swill
• The seven troughed seas and every earthquaking
• continent.