Society and the World

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Felix Randal the farrier, O he is dead then? My duty all ended, Who have watched his mold of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome, Pining, pining.

Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch grass: Yet this will go onward the same Though dynasties pass. Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by; War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.

What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away Ere the barn cocks say Night is growing gray, Leaving all that here can win us.

That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment Day.

Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down You’d treat if met where any bar is, Or help to half-a-crown.

I’ll hold her nozzle agin the bank Till the last galoot’s ashore.

The gratifying feeling that our duty has been done.

My object all sublime I shall achieve in time— To let the punishment fit the crime. 3

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found, I’ve got a little list—I’ve got a little list. Of society offenders who might well be underground, And who never would be missed—who never would be missed.

For you dream you are crossing the Channel, and tossing about in a steamer from Harwich— Which is something between a large bathing machine and a very small second-class carriage.

The House of Peers, throughout the war, Did nothing in particular,

I often think it’s comical How nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal, That’s born into the world alive, Is either a little Liberal, Or else a little Conservative!

When I went to the Bar as a very young man (Said I to myself, said I).

Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes! Bow, bow, ye tradesmen, bow, ye masses.

Come, friends, who plow the sea, Let’s vary piracee With a little burglaree. 1

I am the very model of a modern Major-General. I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral, I know the Kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical.

It is, it is a glorious thing To be a Pirate King.

For he might have been a Roosian, A French or Turk or Proosian, Or perhaps Itali-an. But in spite of all temptations To belong to other nations, He remains an Englishman.

He is an Englishman! For he himself has said it, And it’s greatly to his credit, That he is an Englishman!

When I was a lad I served a term As office boy to an Attorney’s firm. I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor And I polished up the handle of the big front door. I polished up that handle so carefullee That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!

Stick close to your desks and never go to sea, And you all may be Rulers of the Queen’s Navee!

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones and Meridian Lines?” So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply, “They are merely conventional signs!”

Until the Desert knows That Water grows His Sands suffice But let him once suspect That Caspian Fact Sahara dies.