There ain't no universals in this man's town

From Autumn Journal by Louis MacNiece, Canto XIV

Which things being so, as we said when we studied
The classics, I ought to be glad
That I studied the classics at Marlborough and Merton,
Not everyone here having had
The privilege of learning a language
That is incontrovertibly dead,
And of carting a toy-box of hall-marked marmorial phrases
Around in his head.
We wrote compositions in Greek which they said was a lesson
In logic and good for the brain;
We marched, counter-marched to the field-marshal’s blue-pencil baton,
We dressed by the right and we wrote out the sentence again.
We learned that a gentleman never misplaces his accents,
That nobody knows how to speak, much less how to write
English who has not hob-nobbed with the great-grandparents of English,
That the boy on the Modern Side is merely a parasite
But the classical student is bred to the purple, his training in syntax
Is also a training in thought
And even in morals; if called to the bar or the barracks
He always will do what he ought.
And knowledge, besides, should be prized for the sake of knowledge:
Oxford crowded the mantlepiece with gods---
Scaliger, Heinsius, Dindorf, Bentley and Williamowitz---
As we learned our genuflexions for Honor Mods.
And when they taught us philosophy, logic and metaphysics,
The Negative Judgement and the Ding an Sich,
And every single thinker was powerful as Napoleon
And crafty as Metternich.
And it really was very attractive to be able to talk about tables
And to ask if the table is,
And to draw the cork out of an old conundrum
And watch the paradoxes fizz.
And it made one confident to think that nothing
Really was what it seemed under the sun,
That the actual was not real and the real was not with us
And all that mattered was the One.
And they said ‘The man in the street is so naïve, he never
Can see the wood for the trees;
He thinks he knows he sees a thing but cannot
Tell you how he knows the thing he thinks he sees.’
And oh how much I liked the Concrete Universal,
I never thought that I should
Be telling them vice-versa
That they can’t see the trees for the wood.
But certainly it was fun while it lasted
And I got my honours degree
And was stamped as a person of intelligence and culture
For ever wherever two or three
Persons of intelligence and culture
Are gathered together in talk
Writing definitions on invisible blackboards
In non-existent chalk.
But such sacramental occasions
Are nowadays comparatively rare;
There is always a wife or a boss or a dun or a client
Disturbing the air.
Barbarians always, life in the particular always,
Dozens of men in the street,
And the perennial if unimportant problem
Of getting enough to eat.
So blow the bugles over the metaphysicians,
Let the pure mind return to the Pure Mind;
I must be content to remain in the world of Appearance
And sit on the mere appearance of a behind.
But in case you should think my education was wasted
I hasten to explain
That having once been to the University of Oxford
You can never really again
Believe anything that anyone says and that of course is an asset
In a world like ours.
Why bother to water a garden
That is planted with paper flowers?
O the Freedom of the Press, The Late Night Final,
Tomorrow's pulp;
One should not gulp one's port, but as it isn't
Port, I'll gulp it if I want to gulp
But probably I'll just enjoy the color
And pour it down the sink
For I don't call advertisement a statement
Or any quack medicine a drink.
Good-bye now, Plato and Hegel,
The shop is closing down.
They don't want any philosopher-kings in England,
There ain't no universals in this man's town.