Bowles 10. 'O Poverty! though from thy haggard eye'

O Poverty! though from thy haggard eye,
Thy cheerless mien, of every charm bereft,
Thy brow, that Hope's last traces long have left,
Vain Fortune's feeble sons with terror fly;
Thy loneliest haunts all desolate I seek—
For Pity, reckless of her own distress;
And Patience, in the pall of wretchedness,
That turns to the bleak storm her faded cheek;
And Piety, that never told her wrong;
And meek Content, whose griefs no more rebel;
And Genius, warbling sweet her saddest song;
And Sorrow, list'ning to a lost friend's knell,
Long banish'd from the world's insulting throng;—
With thee, and thy unfriended Virtues, dwell.

This may be Bowles's slackest sonnet yet -- a wilderness of non-specific Abstract Qualities that do nothing to bring the notion of 'poverty' alive to the reader. Line 5, 'Thy loneliest haunts all desolate I seek': does 'desolate' modify 'haunts' or 'I'? It makes a difference. If the point of the poem is to record that the poet visits charitably amongst the poor, it casts a rather offputtingly self-congratulatory light over the whole (the splendid 21st-century coinage 'humblebrag' comes to mind). Do I not like this.