Egg-head
A leafs otherness, The whaled monstered sea-bottom, eagled peaks And stars that hang over hurtling endlessness, With manslaughtering shocks Are let in on his sense: So many a one has dared to be struck dead Peeping through his fingers at the world's ends, Or at an ant's head. But better defence Than any militant pride are the freebooting crass Veterans of survival and those champions Forgetfulness, madness. Brain in deft opacities, Walled in translucencies, shuts out the world's knocking With a welcome, and to wide-eyed deafnesses Of prudence lets it speak. Long the eggshell head's Fragility rounds and resists receiving the flash Of the sun, the bolt of the earth: and feeds On the yolk's dark and hush Of a helplessness coming By feats of torpor, by circumventing sleights Of stupefaction, juggleries of benumbing, By lucid sophistries of sight To a staturing 'I am', To the upthrust affirmative head of a man. Braggart-browed complacency in most calm Collusion with his own Dewdrop frailty Must stop the looming mouth of the earth with a pin- Point cipher, with a blank-stare courtesy Confront it and preen, Spurn it muck under His foot-clutch, and opposing his eye's flea-red Fly-catching fervency to the whelm of the sun, Trumpet his own ear dead.
Egg-head - meaning Summary
Defences Against Overwhelming Reality
The poem portrays the human mind as an eggshell: fragile, yet protected by habits of numbness, forgetfulness, and self-deception. Faced with a violent, immense world, the speaker suggests that people survive by limiting what they truly perceive. This defensive blindness eventually supports a proud, assertive sense of self, though the poem treats that confidence as a precarious denial of mortality and vulnerability.
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