When the lank freshman English instructor,

Explaining Platonism to his numb captives,

Said, "Take anything, for instance this table,"

How many close-benched college classrooms,

For years and years from sea to shining sea,

Came without any surprise to mind, taken.

I used to feel sorry for good simple Plato,

All those old tables in his eternity.

But when I went over to his house last night,

It pleased him to show me what pleased him most.

Behold here my very table that I love."

(Ideal antique we laid our Monday themes on.)

Most tabular table, four legs and a top.

Whatever I place on it, belt, lights, meat,

Is borne up from earth on a piece of earth

Cornered by east, west, south, and north legs."

I said, "This is the table I have heard about?"

This is the well-taken table," Plato said,

Older than man's fire, older than his wheel.

It is his cupped hand, ledge, work-stone,

The first thing he needed when he stood up."

(Cheap when new. Cigarette-burns, Rorsohachian

Ink-blots under strata of janitor's varnish.)

Now it is his memory of his first standing up,

As every schoolboy - "

"Yes," I said, "he does.

Let me show you the one I have at home,"

And walking back, I told him what to expect.

Table is my idea of table, Plato.

If it weren't level, I'd jack the house up,

But it's water-level balanced, as if gimballed,

The four legs of micrometric likeness long.

The secret of good tables is a thick top,

And this is a hard, weighty, stainless wood

I have no name for. Big as the room some days,

It changes, oval to square, or round as thought,

And the room changes to frame its color and line,

Yet in multiples of my own height and hand.

We've been on our feet now how many years?

My table is that much better table than yours,

And eighteenth-century cabinet-makers dreamed

Their two-hundred-years-later kind would dream

What you are about to see." I opened the door.