'O miserable abundance, O beggardly riches!'

Truth be told, until now he hadn't heard of John Donne. He hadn't learned much about seventeenth-century poets during his years of chemistry and biology and graduate school. It occurred to him now that he'd spent his whole adult life in a prison workshop. Years and years of manual labor went by. New results filtered through only on the rarest occasions, and always to other people. Miracles didn't happen, but Cliff and his friends kept on working. Like scientific sharecroppers, they slaved all day. They were too highly trained to stop. Overeducated for other work, they kept repeating their experiments. They kept trying to live on their seventeen-thousand-dollar salaries. There was not much poetry in that, or if there was, Cliff had certainly not been privileged to see it [20].

Goodman, Allegra. Intuition. Dial Press, 2006. ISBN 0385336128.