No, no; for my virginity,
When I lose that, says Rose, I’ll die:
Behind the elms last night, cried Dick,
Rose, were you not extremely sick?
— Matthew Prior
Time magazine called this perhaps the only naughty verse that can’t be bowdlerized.
(While we’re at it: In 1680 John Wilmot published a poem about premature ejaculation.)
Two leaps the water from its race
Made to the brook below,
The first leap it was curving glass,
The second bounding snow.
— William Allingham
Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipped, except the currency;
Swear not at all; for, for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend:
Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall;
Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When it’s so lucrative to cheat:
Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly.
Thou shalt not covet, but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.
— Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861)
In Venice, on a small peninsula formed by the meeting of two canals, stands the church of Santa Maria della Salute, bearing a statue of the Virgin Mary. Further out stand statues of Atlas and Fortune. And on the very tip of the point there used to stand a solitary cast-iron lamppost, on whose base was inscribed the legend FONDERIA DI FERRO IN VENEZIA DI THEODOR E HASSELQUIST. This tableau inspired John Sparrow, former Warden of All Souls College, to write a memorable poem:
See the Saviour Queen on high,
Crowned with stars against the sky!
Poised in her appointed place
Gravely she dispenses grace,
While, the pattern to repeat,
From the dome beneath her feet
Flows the marble, fold on fold,
Convoluted, white and cold.
Close at hand a patient pair
On their backs the planet bear;
Atlas bends beneath the strain,
Fortune flaunts her golden vane:
Lucid in the moonlight pale,
Gleams the globe and shifts the sail.
While aloft in ranks serene,
Serving their celestial queen,
Countless constellations bright
Circumnavigate the night,
Two poor earth-bound slaves below
Where the sea-fogs settle slow,
Stationed on the shadowy ledge
That defines the water’s edge,
Lift their lantern through the mist —
Theodor and Hasselquist.
Air and water, sky and stone,
Need foundations not their own:
How can they subsist alone?
I, their structure to sustain,
Recompose them in my brain
Endlessly, but all in vain.
Air and water, stone and sky,
No less mortal they than I,
Human Atlas, doomed to die.
Yet there stirs within my breast
Something not to be suppressed,
Reaching out beyond my reach,
Inexpressible in speech,
Dumb presentiment of prayer
To the Queen of night and air:
When the globe dissolves for me
And the land is lost in sea,
When I cross the last lagoon
Starless, and without a moon,
Faithful still beneath the dome
Be they there to light me home,
Shining from the farther shore —
Hasselquist and Theodor.
(Via John Julius Norwich, More Christmas Crackers, 1990.)
The Chief Defect of Henry King
Was chewing little bits of String.
At last he swallowed some which tied
Itself in ugly Knots inside.
Physicians of the Utmost Fame
Were called at once; but when they came
They answered, as they took their Fees,
“There is no Cure for this Disease.
“Henry will very soon be dead.”
His Parents stood about his Bed
Lamenting his Untimely Death,
When Henry, with his Latest Breath,
Cried, “Oh, my Friends, be warned by me,
That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch, and Tea
Are all the Human Frame requires …”
With that, the Wretched Child expires.
— Hilaire Belloc
I stole through the dungeons, while everyone slept,
Till I came to the cage where the Monster was kept.
There, locked in the arms of a Giant Baboon,
Rigid and smiling, lay … Mrs. RAVOON!
I climbed the clock-tower in the first morning sun
And ’twas midday at least ere my journey was done;
But the clock never sounded the last stroke of noon,
For there, from the clapper, swung Mrs. RAVOON.
I ran through the marsh ‘midst the lightning and thunder,
When a terrible flash split the darkness asunder.
Chewing a rat’s tail and mumbling a rune,
Mad in the moat, squatted Mrs. RAVOON.
I stood by the waters so green and so thick,
And I stirred at the scum with my old, withered stick;
When there rose through the ooze, like a monstrous balloon,
The bloated cadaver of Mrs. RAVOON.
I hauled in the line, and I took my first look
At the half-eaten horror that hung from the hook.
I had dragged from the depths of the limpid lagoon
The luminous body of Mrs. RAVOON.
Facing the fens, I looked back from the shore
Where all had been empty a moment before;
And there, by the light of the Lincolnshire moon,
Immense on the marshes, stood … Mrs. RAVOON!
After this memorable debut in For Love and Money (1956), Paul Dehn’s macabre character has found her way into songs and poems by many writers, even beyond her creator’s death in 1976. They’re cataloged here.
Reader J. William Hook submitted this curiosity to the Strand in August 1899. Holding the page level with the eyes foreshortens the characters and reveals a love poem:
Art thou not dear unto my heart?
Oh, I search that heart and see
And from my bosom tear the part
That beats not true to thee.
But to my bosom thou art dear,
More dear than words can tell,
And if a fault be cherished there,
‘Tis loving thee too well.
There seems to have been a little vogue for this kind of thing — C. Field submitted a similar image three months later.
In September 1931 the Weekend Review pointed out the “regrettable omission of any reference to tooth-brushing in the description of Adam and Eve retiring for the night” in Book IV of Paradise Lost. It challenged its readers to improve Milton’s text; polymath Edward Marsh inserted these lines:
[… and eas’d the putting off
These troublesome disguises which wee wear,]
Yet pretermitted not the strait Command,
Eternal, indispensable, to off-cleanse
From their white elephantin Teeth the stains
Left by those tastie Pulps that late they chewd
At supper. First from a salubrious Fount
Our general Mother, stooping, the pure Lymph
Insorb’d, which, mingl’d with tart juices prest
From pungent Herbs, on sprigs of Myrtle smeard,
(Then were not Brushes) scrub’d gumms more impearl’d
Than when young Telephus with Lydia strove
In mutual bite of Shoulder and ruddy Lip.
This done (by Adam too no less) the pair
[Straight side by side were laid …]
Marsh called this “the cleverest thing I ever did.” “The mordacious Telephus and Lydia are ‘of course,’ as the gossip-writers would say, from Horace, Odes, I, xiii. Martin Armstrong, who had set the competition, gave me the first prize, and was good enough to express the hope that future editors of Milton would put my lines in the appropriate place.”
(From Marsh’s 1939 memoir A Number of People.)
If all the good people were clever,
And all clever people were good,
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could.
But somehow ’tis seldom or never
The two hit it off as they should,
The good are so harsh to the clever,
The clever, so rude to the good!
So friends, let it be our endeavour
To make each by each understood;
For few can be good, like the clever,
Or clever, so well as the good.
— Elizabeth Wordsworth
The second stanza of this poem is an anagram of the first:
A girl once kept a tiny sheep,
Widely famed for whiteness:
This pet would dog her every step,
No certain sign of brightness.
‘Twas viewed, the pest, one day in class
By impish children there;
Kids laugh to see pets, goofing off,
Weren’t trying — open, err!
