Joseph Merrick was fond of quoting from and Isaac Watts's poem entitled "False Greatness:"

Were I so tall to reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with my span,
I must be measured by my soul,
The mind's the standard of the man.

Merrick, better known as The Elephant Man, was a man of dignity who lived his life from the inside out. These poems seek to inhabit that life and to discover that inner landscape of dignity living in the midst of depravity.