Collected Poems

A Ballad of Doom

Late 1920s or early 1930s

There was an awful awful man
Who all things knew and none
And never met a Saracen
And always drank a bun.
He said he was a bullywag
And that he did it for fun.
I don't know what a bullywag is
And I don't think he was one.
Of nonsense and Omniscience
He spoke as one who knew
That this was like a temperament
And that was like a hue.
He said there was a phantom sun
That saw a branching sky
And he who could but never should
Was always God's best boy.
And he who should but never could
Was not in the savoury jam
That thronged the gates of Paradise
Jostling the great I am.
He said he saw a smudgy moon
Adown a patterned ridge
And that Beethoven to his ear
Rang like a bluzzing midge
That bluzzed and bluzzed and bluzzed and bluzzed
Until the eye grew green
With shouting for dear visible things
Where nothing could be seen.
For nothing can be seen, my child,
And when it's seen it's read,
And when red nothing once is seen
The world can go to bed.

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