Louis MacNeice: Pet Shop

Cold blood or warm, crawling or fluttering

Bric-à-brac, all are here to be bought.

Noisy or silent, python or myna,

Fish with long silk trains like dowagers,

Monkeys lost to thought.

In a small tank tiny enamelled

Green terrapin jostle, in a cage a crowd

Of small birds elbow each other and bicker

While beyond the ferrets, eardrum, eyeball

Find that macaw too loud.

Here behind glass lies a miniature desert,

The sand littered with rumpled gauze

Discarded by snakes like used bandages;

In the next door desert fossilized lizards

Stand in a pose, a pause.

But most of the customers want something comfy —

Rabbit, hamster, potto, puss —

Something to hold on the lap and cuddle

Making believe it will return affection

Like some neutered succubus.

Purr then or chirp, you are here for our pleasure,

Here at the mercy of our whim and purse;

Once there was the wild, now tanks and cages,

But we can offer you a home, a haven,

That might prove even worse.

From The Burning Perch (1963). Even if his subject is banal, MacNeice's rhythms are so beguiling that the poem almost exists outside its subject.