describes the treatment of wives in Muslim countries, their confinement, both physical and spiritual, with strange and ironic commendation: "They stare not on the stars from out their attics,/Nor deal (thank God for that!) in mathematics." The object of his irony would have been clear to a knowing reader: his wife's intellectual pretensions. For the benefit of the less knowing, he gestures heavily at what he isn't saying.Why I thank God for that is no great matter,
I have my reasons, you no doubt suppose,
And as, perhaps, they would not highly flatter,
I'll keep them for my life (to come) in prose . . .
from The Guardian: A man of the world
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