When thou, my symphony, dost take a bow
And this thy sweet viola start to stroke,
Inducing fetching tones which wellnigh glow
As thou these calm and limpid sounds invoke,
Then jealous is the one whose fondest wish
Is always to rejoice in thy sweet touch,
Who prompt doth gladden at the faintest swish
Of fingers whose embrace doth say so much.
Fain then would I regain my happiness
And with this stern device resolve to swap,
Yet while thou dost withhold aught thy caress
My stark and bitter pining ne'er shall stop.
   And so, my winsome catch, behold my plight:
   Pluck strings by day, but stroke this Dick by night.

=

When thou, my orchestra, dost gently blow
Across this wooden pipe that then doth sing,
And crimson lips that joyous wind bestow
While shining keys those hands like clockwork swing,
Then wrapped in downcast jealous wrath is he
Whose being doth deserve that rich embrace,
As though this symphony, plied thus by thee,
Doth plainly mock me with that flowing grace.
To switch those states my motive fain should be,
And so thy mouth and digits repossess,
Yet still I wait, fraught with redundancy,
And I but seek in vain thy fond caress.
   Committed thus to stay upon the shelf,
   I know no glee, save playing with myself.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Acquiring and spending, we cast off our powers:
Little we mind in Nature that is ours;
We stripped those hearts away, one selfish boon!
That Sea which bends her bosom to the moon;
The winds that scream or thunder at all hours,
And be up-gathered now like quiet flowers;
For that, for each dear thing, we're out of tune;
It moves us not. - My God! I'd rather be
A Heathen practised in some creed outworn;
Then may I, seated by this British lea,
Catch glimpses that should make me less forlorn;
Spy Proteus stretching from his distant sea;
Then hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

=

See, where his difficult way that Old Man wins
Bent from a crush of Mulberry leaves! - most hard
Appears his lot, to that thin Worm compared,
For whom this quest at early day begins.
Acknowledging no task-master, at will
(As though her labour and her ease were twins)
She seems to toil, to pleasure to lie still -
To rest then, couched within this thread she spins.
So fare they - with the Man her trodden squire.
Ere long their fates do each to each conform:
Both pass into new being, - but the Worm,
Transfigured, droops down to a death most dire;
His innate Spirit can, he trusts, ascend
To hope unbounded, honour without end.

  The BabelFish translator at http://babelfish.altavista.com/ is a highly ingenious program that mimics the higher reaches of human thought, breaks down the barriers between nations and automatically does lazy children's German homework for them. It does this by taking a piece of text, shedding each irrelevant prefix and suffix, forcing it through a phrasebook word by word, double-checking the Oxford Dictionary for synonyms when in doubt, adding random letters throughout, shading in the Os, dividing the result by forty-three and finally sending it to Morocco and back and printing it in a silly font. The upshot of all this is that if you feed a simple sentence like "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?" into BabelFish, it will hurl back some rubbish like (and I quote), "Want you to lay down with me it evening?"
  Now it is such a fanciful notion that this piece of unmitigated rubbish was actually designed by a sentient primate that a few have chosen to regard it as proof of a huge conspiracy by the U.S. Government. The argument goes a bit like this: by covertly nobbling the development of this translation software, the CIA has ensured that anyone wishing to exploit the full capabilities of the Net must be fluent in English. But to be online nowadays is increasingly a necessity, so the primary language of the medium is forced upon everyone and inexorably supplants each other tongue. This hegemony in turn paves the way for an influx of cheap sitcoms, eighties repeats and Adam Sandler films to envelop the planet, and then the mind control begins.
  Of course, most observers consider the whole theory to be a load of caribou's offal, and officials from both the White House and Altavista have made denials on frequent occasions. But it can scarcely be a coincidence that everyone who has publicly professed the theory has vanished in highly mysterious circumstances shortly afterwards, quite suddenly, never to be heard of agai