...Till your towers come tumbling down

"To hell with the psychologists and city-bred psychoanalysts and all the other freaks spawned by our rotting civilization. They’ve lived between concrete and shingles so long they’ve forgot their origin. They ought to get out before sun-up and walk through the grass barefooted some morning, just for an unfamiliar experience. I once wrote a rhyme in which I tried to express my resentment:

You have built a world of paper and wood,
Culture and cult and lies;
Has the cobra altered beneath his hood,
Or the fire in the tiger’s eyes?

You have turned from valley and hill and flood,
You have set yourselves apart,
Forgetting the earth that feeds the blood
And the talon that finds the heart.

You boast you have stilled the lustful call
Of the black ancestral ape,
But Life, the tigress that bore you all,
Has never changed her shape.

And a strange shape comes to your faery mead,
With a fixed black simian frown,
But you will not know and you will not heed
Till your towers come tumbling down.

I’ve forgotten the rest of it, which is doubtless as well."

-- Robert E. Howard to August Derleth,
9 May 1936