On Happiness in Value

The beast, for fuller stomach prowling,
Without intent devouring prey,
Against its herd's transgressors growling,
Does on unthinking levels stay.

It does pursue its basic needs,
Yet naught in conscience does it want;
Upon fly-ridden carcass feeds;
No artificial tool can vaunt.

It did its motions, fangs, and claws
Inherit from decrepit wilderness.
It knows not Nature's structured laws
And cannot mend its primitive duress.

It acts, by mere stale impulse driven,
In circumstances by its program undescribed.
But morsels of the truth it has been given,
Naught by experience prescribed.

It perishes, ignominiously rotting.
It held no reason to prevent
With anything but aimless trotting
A grim, oblivious descent.

But in man's mind no barrier's standing.
He learns from life, perceives reality,
By structured knowledge elements commanding,
From facts discovering morality.

Man strives to live with conscious reason.
What beasts cannot assure he amplifies,
His resource management most prudent,
His profits soaring in their size.

Tomorrow is for him decided--
Not blind subsistence like the rest,
Not horns in null stalemate collided,
But for intelligence a test.

How great a plenty can he furnish,
How much convenience design,
How many crags to planes can burnish,
What tasks to burdened beasts assign?

'Tis all his, by intent and right,
His life (and naught beside it is his goal)
Never monotonous and trite,
But nourished by insightful soul.

He laughs, and not from arbitrary revel,
But from grand progress, joy defining.
Never should he his life dishevel
Thinking that value's happiness confining.

Pleasure's inseparable from merit.
Leisure from labor can't be torn.
Man can't prosperity inherit;
To stall is to have life forsworn.

Not altruistic self-surrender,
Not feeling-driven wanton whim,
Only strict reason can yield splendor
And stretch the cup of pleasures' brim.