Where Plenty smiles - alas! she smiles for few,
And those who taste not, yet behold her store,
Are as the slaves that dig the golden ore,
The wealth around them makes them doubly poor.

They ravage and sweep away my banquet, and befoul and upset the cups, there is a violent stench and a sorry battle arises, for the monsters are as famished as I. What all have scorned or polluted with their touch, or what has fallen from their filthy claws, helps me to linger thus among the living.

Life is a banquet. And the tragedy is that most people are starving to death.

We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.

The world appears like a great family, Whose lord, oppressed with pride and poverty, (That to the few great bounty he may show) Is fain to starve the numerous train below.

RAGNA: All you do not take from the world the world takes from you, all the flowering plants you have denied yourself are full of you, your presence makes the wheat fields uneasy, because of you and likes of you the markets are querulous and mean and overfed. The joints of beef you have not eaten have eaten you. They are glutted with the mouths they have left empty.

Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.

I see that dereliction can survive in opulence; the abundantly wealthy with destitution in their stare.

How many we know who have fled the sweetness of a tranquil life in their homes, among the friends, to seek the horror of uninhabitable deserts; who have flung themselves into humiliation, degradation, and the contempt of the world, and have enjoyed these and even sought them out.

I do not envy those whose introduction to nature was lush meadows, lakes, and swamps where life abounds. The desert hills of Yakima had a poverty that sharpened perception.

It is monstrous for one to live in luxury while many are in want.

Their lusts had known no limit until now. They had gorged themselves, surpassed their own imaginings again and again, recklessly squandering what they had supposed to be inexhaustible; they had been like children in a house filled with sweetmeats, destroying what they could not consume. Until now.
Now it was as though the planet itself was sick of their arrogance.

Luxury, that baneful poison, has unstrung and enfeebled her sons.

Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted riotously, all according to the abundance of game and the fortune of hunting.