Death of an Ikonic Visionary (or is that Visionary Ikon?)

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Death of a Visionary

The death of a visionary is often an occasion for labeling the man an ikon, as if he were a religious image painted on a board.  One longs for accuracy in eulogies.  But how can one speak of such a visionary ikon (or is that an ikonic visionary?) without resorting to florid language.  Let us gush veritable gallons of effusion in celebrating how he touched our lives and changed our world forever.

With hagiographic hyperbole and muddled metaphors let us remember a truly visionary man, a man on the cutting edge of technology, a man ahead of his time,  a man who transformed communications forever, a man whose invention made a cosmic leap (“cosmic leap” combines hyperbole and a tired metaphor in a two-fer) in how people saw the world around them, and how they wrote about it.

This man’s invention spawned new industries, and not only made easier the transmission of traditional cultures from one generation to the next, but in a sense created its own cultures.

This man, before he was thirty years old, created a technology that launched a reformation in the economy and even in literature and art.  His new way of manipulating language and culture through the production of useful objects became in itself its own object of near-adoration, making technology and its physical manifestations as aesthetically pleasing as they are utilitarian.

Generations of tinkerers will surely display the great man’s image as a sort of technology ikon in their garage laboratories, and classroom posters of him will inspire generations of children to work hard so they can be just like him.

Before this man, all was darkness and superstition; after him, a new enlightenment.

Yes, gentlepersons all, let us hold in our hearts forever the memory of Henry Mill, who patented the typewriter in 1714.

 -30-

"A Barrow Piled With Books"

Over the way is a barrow piled with books. A lean young man picks them over eagerly. A working lad: a hungry-looking young man. He counts out six pennies and buys a book. I am curious. I edge up and look. Milton's Paradise Lost! And he so hungry; and lucky, too, in the long run! A thing you always remember happily is the way you starved yourself for books.

 - A Manchester street scene in H. V. Morton's The Call of England, 1936

Ashes to Bambi and Dust to Rocky the Flying Squirrel

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Ashes to Bambi and Dust to Rocky the Flying Squirrel

“Do we all holy rites. / Let there be sung ‘Non Nobis’ and ‘Te Deum.’ / The dead with charity enclosed in clay.”  -- Shakespeare, Henry V, IV.viii.128-130

 A couple of hands in Alabama will, for $850, load the ashes of your loved one into shotgun, rifle, or pistol rounds for that final hunt.  The company is called Holy Smoke, and the owners, Clem and Thad, insist that Holy Smoke is a “reverent business.”

Oh, yeah.  When you think of reverence with regard to the passing of a loved one, you just naturally think of a funeral establishment called Holy Smoke.

In Virgilius’ The Aeneid, that masterwork of Augustan propaganda, funereal cremation is part of several Mediterranean pagan cultures.  When Aeneas abandons Queen Dido after a sure-I’ll-respect-you-in-the-morning moment during a hunt (a hunt perhaps using arrows made from dead people), she flings herself onto her own funeral pyre, possibly singing “C’mon, Baby, Light my Fire.”

In The Aeneid, cremation followed by the burial of the remaining bones and ashes is so essential to the worship of the gods (we now call them film stars) that the soul of someone who is not burned and buried properly cannot be ferried by Charon across the Neches to Louisiana. 

Along the eastern short of the Inland Sea the Philistines sacrificed their first-born to Moloch by throwing them, alive, into a fire, no doubt explaining to the child that this was a mother’s right to choose the autonomy of her own body.

In Nordic paganism kings and war leaders were honored to have their bodies, weapons, grave goods, a wife or two, and a dog piled onto their favorite warship with lots of kindling, and pushed out to sea in flames.  Too bad about the poor dog.

In an episode of the television series Alice Flo says that she wants to be cremated and her ashes scattered over Robert Redford. 

Christianity has historically preferred inhumation, possibly as a reaction to pagan usages, but has permitted cremation on occasions of mass deaths because of plagues, hurricanes, earthquakes, war, or Governor Chris Christie tripping and falling from a podium onto his audience.  Because of land-use issues and population density, Christianity is now more open to cremation.

One of the finest men I ever knew left instructions for his daughter, a pilot, to scatter his ashes at coordinates that were never to be revealed to anyone else.  That’s neat. 

On the occasion of a lengthy visitation before the funeral of a boyhood pal I sat myself down in a pew and wondered idly why there was a cardboard box in the pew along with a Bible and a box of Kleenex.  I read the label on the box – inside was all that remained of the boyhood pal.

And on yet another occasion of visitation I clumsily bumped against a table and very nearly dumped the ashes of another honored friend onto the floor.  Leave it to me to make a complete ash of myself on solemn occasions.

And they were indeed solemn occasions, with loving families making genuinely reverent decisions.

But having Grandma or Grandpa shot from guns, like the childhood breakfast cereal advertised on television in the 1950s?

What is the culinary convention of using powdered relatives for hunting?  Lots of folks enjoy sausage made from pork, venison, and spices, but will they like sausage made from pork, venison, and Grandpa? 

Just askin’.

Will Catholics have ol’ Dad molded into Rosary beads?  This would be one way for the survivors to forget ol’ Dad, just as they have forgotten the Rosary.

Fishermen could have a problem: do they skip the cremation part and have Uncle Clem cut up into bait? 

Reverently, of course.

Our masters, the Chinese Communists, have been recycling dead humans for years, and will have a healthy prisoner shot to specification for an organ transplant for the world’s wealthy.

But the prisoner is recycled reverently.

As for the less wealthy among us, we can only wonder if that nice leather belt stamped “Made in China” was made by Prisoner Chang or of Prisoner Chang.

Reverently, no doubt.

How about that final hymn:  “Abide with (POW!) me; fast falls (KA-BLAM!) the eventide; / the darkness (KA-BLOOEY!) deepens; Lord, with me abide.”

A toxicologist, according to a USA Today article, says that hunting with “ashes would pose less of a problem than any lead pellets historically used.”  That would certainly help the priest or minister with the eulogy: “Ol’ Thad – whatever else we can say about him, he was less of a problem than lead pellets.”

Break out the sniffle-tissues.  But then from what – or from whom – are the sniffle-tissues made?  Maybe from human tissue?  Hmmmmmmmm?

Or perhaps from the tattered, ragged remnants of a collapsing civilization.

-30-

TeleCheck and Tractor Supply Company -- Not Professional

I have shopped at The Tractor Supply Company in Beaumont for years.  If you can avoid the junkier made-in-China stuff, TSC features some good products at good prices.  However, I'm going to avoid the Beaumont Tractor Supply Company altogether in the near future until they become more professional, and will stay away from any other business entangled with TeleCheck.

On Tuesday I bought some pet food and a hose repair kit (made in China, to replace the even worse made-in-China connections on a made-in-China hose not even a year old) at the Tractor Supply in Beaumont, and my check was refused.  I feared that perhaps my checking account had been compromised and so paid in cash and drove straight to my bank.

In the event, my account was fine; the problem lay with TeleCheck and with Beaumont's Tractor Supply for retaining TeleCheck's services. 

The young person at the cash register was professional, and I do not fault her at all; she has been let down by an employer whose concept of customer service is a presumption of guilt.  Having one's check refused in front of several employees and customers is embarrassing.

I wrote TSC corporate a polite but firm letter in the matter.  In addition to not patronizing Tractor Supply Company, I'm going to avoid shopping at any store in collusion with TeleCheck, even though I almost always pay cash.

Leaf-Time

Mack Hall, HSG

Leaf-Time

O may our lives close like a leaf that falls

And laughs in falling at its happy end
Air-dancing down a sky of Dresden blue
Sun-sliding sideways in a blithesome breeze
Soft-singing in a sweet sinopian sun
Who smiles grandfatherly on each blest leaf
Remembering its spring, and summer too
Pushed from the wood after the last fell frost
To grow from mother-tree and taste the air
In the Apollonian sun of youth
To work and play in Saturnian summer
And then to glow in ripe Pomona’s dusk
In celebration of all life, and then
At last to leap into eternity

25 September 2011

A Bed-and-Breakfast...

A bed-and-breakfast is what a brothel becomes when it has lost all self-respect.

The Death of the Medicare Sled

Mack Hall, HSG

The Death of the Medicare Sled

On Friday the last Ford Crown Victoria was assembled and sold, ending the era of the big American sedan.  Except for our humble, democratically-elected, self-denying public servants looking down upon us benignly from the armored windows of their custom-built limousines, sedans are Barbie-cars now, little plastic constructs more suitable for the nursery floor than for Route 66.

This last big American iron was actually built by Esquimaux and Mounties in Canada, between the assembly lines for birch-bark canoes and dog sleds.  What a mess – we can’t even fail in our own country; we have to cross the border so another country can help us commit industrial suicide.

But wait – there’s more.  The Saint Thomas Assembly plant in Talbotville, Ontario was closed with the production of the last Crown Vic, and that last Crown Vic was sent to Saudi Arabia.  From that box of metaphorical parts one can build an irony bigger than the car.

Beaumont ISD has not yet announced its lawsuit against Ford because of the economic impact of the end of the non-compact.

And now the unemployed Canadian auto workers must also worry about a big American satellite (something else we used to build) falling on them.

NASA’s 6+ ton Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite, launched in 1991, is due to fall to earth sometime and somewhere this week, maybe on you.  If these six tons of knowledge bash you, you might be in trouble because NASA has said you’re not supposed to touch any of it.  Your smoking ashes could be arrested.

Something styling itself space.com says that NASA says (and if someone says that someone says that someone else says, hey, it must be true) that there’s only a one in 3,200 chance of you getting evolved and devolved by this somewhat heavier-than-air junior high school science experiment gone rogue.  At last report there were some 312,191,000 American customers for Chinese manufactures, and so if we limit the crash site to Alaska, Hawaii, or the contiguous states, only 9,787 Americans are going to die from a massive satellite fail this week.

The satellite might instead fall on Canada, though.  American weather reporters often tell us that a given hurricane is nothing but a fish storm heading off to the north to Newfoundland, and so no one is going to be impacted.  Thus, since Newfoundland is inhabited only by fish, six tons of recyclables descending upon St. John’s will harm only an unemployed codfish or two.

Beaumont ISD has not yet announced its lawsuit against NASA because of the economic impact of the impact of a satellite cratering Mollie’s Irish Café’ along Water Street.

Just a passing – or falling – thought here – when America’s slide-ruliest math nerds launched this thing twenty years ago, why did they not plan for a controlled landing?

Imagine Ford dropping a Crown Victoria out of orbit to flame down upon a Tim Horton’s in Talbotville, Ontario where a former Ford employee is carrying out the garbage just before locking up for the night.

An engineer would say that’s the price of knowledge; a liberal arts graduate would ask what happened to his doughnut.

Beaumont ISD has not yet announced its lawsuit against Tim Horton’s because of, oh, any excuse will do.

-30-

When Writing About 9/11...

When writing about 9/11, never miss an opportunity to avoid talking about yourself.  9/11 is not about you, where you were, your feelings, how your world changed, how 9/11 defined you, how you made a blankie square; it's about the people who were murdered.

First Morning as a School Volunteer

My Frist...First Day of School

by Mack Hall, Esq.

I woke up early.

I took a bath.

I ate some breakfast of toast and cheese and coffee.

I dressed nice because this was my first day as a Book Buddy.

I said good morning to the dogs and the cats and the kittens. I said good bye to the dogs and the cats and the kittens. I made sure they had food and fresh water.

I wne t...went to school. I was scared. And then I saw lots of my friends and I wasn't scared no m...any more.

My Book Buddy is (name). He is very nice. He wears glasses like I do. He likes to read like I do. He likes mysterys...mysrte...mysteries, like I do. We read a book about lion kittens. It was fun. (name) reads good...well. He took a computer est...test about the book about the lion kittens. He did good...well.

I got candy.

I like school. I am going to go back every Friday.

More old people...um...adults should volunteer at their elementary schools.

My dogs and cats and kittens were very glad to see me.

 

 

The End

The Russian Soldier, 1918

Mack Hall, HSG

 The Russian Soldier, 1918

The Russian soldier, Moskina¹ in hand,

Though filthy, tired, unknown, unpaid, unfed,
Fights for his God, his Czar, and his Fatherland:
No medals, no vodka, no sleep, no bread

His clumsy lowest-bidder boots,² they rot

Into the foulness where the world’s sins pitch
Into the slime of old Iscariot³
Good men to die in some Gehenna-ditch

Saint George, Saint Michael, and Saint Seraphim

Preserve him in his soul from Judas’ crime⁴
Life’s-end tears, life’s-end prayers, a blood-choked scream
And so he climbs the trench wall one last time,

Three cartridges⁵ clenched in his frozen fist,

He disappears at last into the mist⁶

^1.        Moss-Nagant rifle
^2.        Betrayal by contractors
^3.        Betrayal by politicians and Bolsheviks
^4.        The Russian soldier does not fail his duty
^5.        Ammunition shortage / the Trinity / God, Czar, and Fatherland
^6.        The Russian soldier is known to God

The Menace of Unregistered Piccolos

Mack Hall, HSG

The Menace of Unregistered Piccolos

(In green accordance with the green Cliché’ Protection Act of 1904 as greenly amended in 2008 and greenly interpreted by a green and hemorrhoidal federal GS-4 clerk this week, no predictable puns on frets and sour notes were employed in the green construction of this green column)

With the falling dollar, the worst unemployment since 1945, a border so open that the Mexican army makes unopposed raids into the USA, and the ownership of what remains of our economy by our merry friends the People’s Liberation Army, we can take comfort in the fact that our federal government is at last striking back – against Gibson Guitar.  

Extremist Gibson craftsmen in Memphis and Nashville have been terrorizing the American people long enough with their unregistered guitars manufactured from unauthorized wood.

But all is not lost – in the past few weeks crack squads of federal commandos have mounted bold raids against jihadist woodworkers armed with chisels of mass destruction.  Evil guitars have been seized, as well as undocumented alien wood.  The records of the un-mutual activities of the out-of-control Gibson Guitar workers may well lead to a series of trials in the spirit of Roland Freisler, the patron not-a-saint of the modern federal judiciary.

Something styled the Lacey Act and the whims of the Forest Stewardship Council, the Customs service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service (Fish?  Wildlife?  Guitars?) are used to suppress guitar manufacture and ownership in these United States.  A maker of guitars must be able to provide to any of the increasingly numerous and pestilential types of federal police documentation about the species and national origins of any wood used to build a guitar in this country.  Further, any American who owns a guitar must also be able to provide documentation to any of the many types of federal police about the species and national origins of any wood in a privately-owned guitar.  Failure to do so will result in a fine and in the seizure of the guitar.

Don’t try to cross a border or board an aircraft with a guitar you want to keep – if you don’t have the paperwork for your guitar and some fellow with a federal badge wants your guitar, it’s his.

You’ll never see your guitar again.

How’s that for a topic for a protest song, eh?

Your possession of a guitar or any other musical instrument containing wood is now a crime of which you are automatically guilty unless you can document your innocence.  What sort of wood is in any part of your great-grandpa’s fiddle?  Prove it, citizen.  That old guitar you bought in a pawn shop and restored?  Your papers, please, citizen.  The piano your ancestors bought in the 19^th century?  Tell us what we want to know about the ivory and the wood, citizen.   Your grandma’s old high school Bundy clarinet from the 1950s?  You must explain yourself, citizen.

And what offense has the Gibson Guitar company committed against The People to find itself particularly singled out by the regime?

What a better world this would be if the internal security police were to lay aside their stinkin’ badges, their pistols, and their warrants and other inky blots and sit with the Gibson Guitar workers at their work benches for an hour.  Imagine a federal agent who never had a real job learning how a craftsman selects and processes a bit of wood for a guitar fret.  Imagine federal judges learning something about work and art instead of oppressing workers and artists.

In anticipation of Labor Day the feds did an Eliot Ness on guitar makers; maybe in memory of 9/11 they’ll bust some uppity flutists.

-30-

Cellphonia in F Flat

Mack Hall

Cellphonia in F Flat

A chamber piece for two sulks and a soda

He yawns, his head propped up against a wall
Of head-stained, head-banged green-fluorescent blocks   
In the back of the room, in Marlboro Country
Reposing in sad, sullen insolence
Furtively strumming a silent keypad
Flinging his unique existential angst
Into cool, pure, plasticized electrons
And out into the post-Dairy Queen night
Where there’s real life, man, not these books and stuff,
Real life; you wouldn’t understand. I’m me
And you don’t know who I am, man.  I am:
An inspirational singer-songwriter
An artist, a great soul misunderstood
Raging against a machine that isn’t there
An angry Romantic on government grants

Passenger to Frankfurt, by Agatha Christie

Passenger to Frankfurt
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie Ltd: 1970

One of Miss Christie’s stand-alone (that is, not a Poirot or a Miss Marple) yarns, Passenger to Frankfurt is a dated query into the various post-war revolutions that continued the foul works of Hitler and Stalin. Miss Christie considers the world-wide situation of that dark time, and then creates fictional characters to investigate the source. The neo-Nazi denouement is, in retrospect, mostly in error, but then Miss Christie was writing fiction and, anyway, could not have known that the mischief was almost wholly Communist in origin.

The villains of this story are part of a secret, international Nazi resurgence of youth funded by decayed tycoons and even more decayed European aristocracy. That Nazis, like Communists, originate with dysfunctional and uneducated gangs posing as workers’ movements seems not to have occurred to Miss Christie, or perhaps she assumed that the reality would not have the appeal of alpine castles and marching Hitler Youth. With a little more violence and any sex at all this book could have been any one of the hundreds of mass-market, look-alike paperbacks with lurid covers featuring swastikas and / or hammers-and-sickles and / or automatic pistols occupying, like Soviet soldiers along the Berlin Wall, yards and yards of bookstore shelves .

Even so, this is a good read for an airplane trip or a vegetative Sunday afternoon, and the characterizations, especially of the minor characters, are delightful.

Agatha Christie’s books, more than a generation after her death, continue to sell by the thousands and thousands.

The reviewer’s books sell not by the thousands, or even by the hundred or dozens, but rather by the ones from lulu.com.

THE WORLD OF SAINT PAUL, by Joseph M. Callewaert

The World of Saint Paul
Joseph M. Callewaert
Ignatius Press: San Francisco. 2011

What an excellent book! Mr. Callewaert ‘s life of St. Paul reveals a thorough familiarity with the geography, history, and mythology of the Mediterranean world.

With the usual caveat of “I have no window to look into a man’s soul” (attributed to St. Thomas More and to Queen Elizabeth I), one infers that Mr. Callewaert is a believing Catholic, the adjective “believing” sadly necessary at present.

Mr. Callewaert gives the reader an informal but not patronizing style, and deliberately and skillfully comes close to fiction in depicting for us the scenes and characters in St. Paul’s life. He describes the cities, especially, and provides clear maps to show us these cities and the routes of travel. His knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Semitic mythologies is wonderful, and he dissects – respectfully – many of Saint Paul’s letters to show us the historical and mythological allusions the Saint uses to appeal to his audiences. Perhaps without meaning to, Mr. Callewaert makes an excellent argument for returning to the teaching of mythology, the mythology which all Christian knew for 2,000 years and to which most schoolchildren were exposed (on a g-rated level) until the 1970s, when a secular obsession with testing isolated skills and a fundamentalist fear of anything that “ain’t in the Bible” pretty much ended the teaching of Christian civilization in grade school.

The only weak part of the book is the brief introduction in which Mr. Callewaert employs the first-person singular repeatedly and almost as repeatedly uses quotation marks to indicate sarcasm. These lapses into adolescent FaceBook-ese are, happily, not continued in the text.

Mr. Callewaert was born in Belgium and grew up during the German occupation. He is a Knight Commander of the French Order of Merit, has written numerous travelogues, and is now a citizen of the U.S.

The reviewer barely graduated from high school.

Hurricane Season is Here -- Stock up on Filler Language

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The height – or depth – of hurricane season is here, which means it’s time for us to review all the Weather Channel cliches’ so we can try to sort out the reality:

1. Weather Channelistas always employ allusions to Hurricane Katrina, which, as we all know, was the only hurricane to strike these shores within living memory.
2. “We’re not out of the woods” – curious metaphor for a hurricane.
3. “Rain event” – why don’t they just say rain?
4. “Dodged the bullet” – hurricanes don’t shoot
5. “Stormed ashore” – well, yes, storms do indeed storm.
6. “Wreak havoc” – what, really, is havoc, and why and how is it wreaked? What is wreaking, anyway?
7. “Swath of destruction” – okay, Mr. Weather Channel Dude, quick, without consulting a dictionary, what is a swath?
8. “Mother Nature’s wrath” and “Mother Nature’s fury” – to which Greek or Roman nature goddess would the concept of Mother Nature apply?
9. “Decimated” – not unless the death rate is 10%
10. “Trees snapped like matchsticks” – do matchsticks ever snap like trees?
11. “Looks like a war zone.” No, it doesn’t. No one involved in the horror of combat looks upon the scene afterward and says “It looks like a hurricane zone.”
12. Storms that brew – what do they brew? Tea? Coffee? White lightnin’?
13. Storms that gain or lose steam, as if they were teakettles or steam locomotives
14. Hurricanes that make landfall – well, what else would they make? A gun rack in shop class?
15. Batten down the hatches (Darn, I forgot to buy a hatch; I wonder if the stores are still open)
16. Hunker down
17. Calm before the storm, always “eerie”
18. Calm in the eye of the storm, always “eerie”
19. Calm after the storm, always “eerie”
20. Visually, the stock shot of some doofus in a slicker, standing on the beach, and yelling into a microphone to tell us to stay off the beach.

Finally, always remember that, first and last, hurricane reporting is about Katrina; everything is about Katrina. Katrina, Katrina, Katrina. Audrey? Carla? Rita? Ike? Never heard of ‘em, pal.

Migratory Waterfowl

Mack Hall

Migratory Waterfowl

Loud-quacking, honking, singing, winging, they,
Beneath their wild-wind-beating wings rise up
From the waters of life, towards the sun,
Refreshed in holy pilgrimage along
Cold sky-trails from a long-ago warm nest,
Across the tattered scapes of history,
To a perfect visual landing at dawn
In the golden trees of Jerusalem

Fuhrerbunker

Mack Hall, HSG

Fuhrerbunker

Do not descend into that withering world
Of pale self-pity dying in the depths,
A ghost hugging resentments to itself
And long-decayed hatreds treasured and fed
Upon the corpse of your frail, failing flesh
Hopelessly trapped in souring concrete cells
The empire you carefully constructed
Constricts, constrains, contracts, conforms, condemns

You cry to yourself that you cannot win
And that is true. You are without hope, doomed,
Waiting, lurking in a hugging wallow of
Stagnating fulfillment of the god-Self
Sitting on a floor fetid with refuse
Foul failures feeding on your inwardness
The feeble fluorescent lamps flickering
Shed shadows, never light, and never Light.

You cry to yourself that you cannot win
And that is true. You cannot win. Not you.
Not with the fantasy maps you drew, or
Upon the dead telephones whereon you
Communicated your nothingness to…
Nothing.
Open your hands. Open your eyes.
Don’t go down there. It’s dark down there. Don’t go.

A Dairy Queen Waitress in Tuscany

Mack Hall, HSG

A Dairy Queen Waitress in Tuscany

Eat, drink, pray, love, hamburger, shake, and fries
Boyfriend, baby, trailer park, sad tired eyes
Creepy men, cranky boss, and ice-cream floats
A wheezing Honda with overdue notes
Cinder-blocks, fluorescents, grilled cheese to go
No child-support this month, ‘nother cup of Joe
Ten-year-reunion, can’t go, how time flew
Two shifts that day, the trailer rent is due
Baby at Mama’s, boyfriend still in bed
He’ll look for work tomorrow, that’s what he said
“Order up!” the fry cook hollers, and she
Dreams of a someday-summer in Italy

In Malignant Repose

Mack Hall, HSG

In Malignant Repose

A plastic sphinx in malignant repose
Perpetually admires its sered-soul self
Echoing self-seeking irrelevance
Head bowed in wanton worship of pale lights
Passionately drooling on soft tessarae
Drowning in a stoup of metaphor soup
Night-glowing community loneliness
The glowing box and the box-glowing self
Whose Rods and cones fix back upon themselves
Self-adoration in a far-closed loop
And die unknowing on a long-dead moon.

At the Sign of the Blue Boar

Mack Hall, HSG


At the Sign of the Blue Boar

Under the oak tree, long ago,
We lived with merry Robin Hood,
Who taught us how to bend the bow
And live aright in green Sherwood

Now let us now part the leaves again,
And find that merry life, and bold.
We’ll roam again as we did then --
How came it that we all grew old?

Let us stroll to the Blue Boar Inn,
Quaff a mug of October ale
Nigh unto Sherwood and the fen,
And, laughing, tell a jolly tale

Old Gaffer Swanthold might rest there
Easing his bones in the summer sun
Chatting sweet Joan whose auburn hair
Reminds him of his youthful fun.

Stout of sinew and bold of heart,
Home from the wars i’the Holy Land,
A gallant knight now takes his part,
A hero and a brave, strong man:

Sir Richard o’ the Lea, a knight
A warrior’s heart, but mortgaged land,
Always first in a desperate fight
Poor, but we know no better man

O Alan-a-Dale, tune your lute
And sing how Midge the Miller’s son
Bullied by men (of ill repute),
With Robin’s aid fought them, and won.

O sing of good Saint Swithin whose
Feast day predicts the summer’s moods,
Forty days as the Saint doth choose,
Smiling on England’s grain-fat roods

Maid Marian, she’s just a girl
So lightly dancing through the wood
But she can outshoot any churl
And she is sweet on Robin Hood

Will Scarlet, too, and Little John
Scathelock and Stutely, still
Ambushing fat bishops anon,
Not far from old Hanacker Mill

And we were with them there along
The London Road from Nottingham
Whistling a happy, wordless song,
For nothing rhymes with “Nottingham.”

Sing of Sherwood’s high-leaping deer
Falling to arrows swift and sure
Around the campfire, such good cheer
Venison and ale – the poor man’s cure

Far off in London, Henry, King,
And his Eleanor of Aquitaine
Too oft ignore their far-off shires
And their people’s sheriff-ridden pain

But with us always, happy Tuck
Ever hungry but never mean,
A Friar of faith, of joy, of pluck,
A child of blessed Mary, Queen

Telling his beads, sharpening his sword
Saying Masses for Robin’s band
Seated first at the groaning board
Oft poaching on the bishop’s land

O, merry robbers once we were
In green and sunny barefoot youth
“Stand and deliver, noble sir!
Your purse is too heavy, in God’s truth.”

Under the oak tree, long ago,
We lived with merry Robin Hood,
Who taught us how to bend the bow
And live aright in green Sherwood