Pale worldly want, a spectre lowers;
What is a world of vanities
To a world as fair as ours?

In the same spirit Burns belittles his poverty, saying, in _An Epistle
to Davie, Fellow Poet_:

To lie in kilns and barns at e'en
When bones are crazed, and blind is thin
Is doubtless great distress,
Yet then content would make us blest.

Shelley, too, eschews wealth, declaring, in _Epipsychidion_,

Our simple life wants little, and true taste
Hires not the pale drudge luxury to waste
The scene it would adorn.

Later poetry is likely to take an even exuberant attitude toward
poverty. [Footnote: See especially verse on the Mermaid group, as
_Tales of the Mermaid Inn_, Alfred Noyes. See also Josephine Preston
Peabody, _The Golden Shoes_; Richard Le Gallienne, _Faery Gold_; J. G.
Saxe, _The Poet to his Garret_; W. W. Gibson, _The Empty Purse_; C. G.
Halpine, _To a Wealthy Amateur Critic_; Simon Kerl, _Ode to Debt, A Leaf
of Autobiography_; Thomas Gordon Hake, _The Poet's Feast_; Dana Burnet,
_In a Garret_; Henry Aylett Sampson, _Stephen Phillips Bankrupt_.] The
poet's wealth of song is so great that he leaves coin to those who wish
it. Indeed he often has a superstitious fear of wealth, lest it take
away his delight in song. In Markham's _The Shoes of Happiness_, only
the poet who is too poor to buy shoes possesses the secret of joy.