A Fig for a Foolish One1 or Faber in a Firkin2

by the author of

“Cameron’s Fall”3

and

“Have with you to Oakhill Park”4

to the tune of

“Hey Boys! Up go We”5

The Elephant remembers,

The Whale cannot forget,

The fifteen wild Decembers,6

And both of them regret

That fish and fowl and faber7

And other foolish things

Have wasted so much labour

Performing on the tabor

And dancing Highland Flings.

The Elephant can not sit down,

The Whale (alas!) can’t fly,

But there’s a tavern in the town

Where both drink old Tokay,8

Standing together in the dark,

Unbloody and unbowed,

Planning a new autumnal lark

To tease the laird of Oakhill Park9

Something both long and loud.

A chair designed for chairmen10

Who construe Greek in church,11

A rubber Worcester Pearmain.12

A nickel-plated birch,

A pineapple that whistles,

Bananas, too, that squeak,

Brooms with explosive bristles.

A match that merely sizzles,

And coffee cups that leak:

These things the Elephant and Whale

Have ready up their sleeve;

“This time”, they say, “we shall not fail

(With or without your leave)

To hoist on high with his petard13

The versifying squire,

And make life infinitely more hard

For the poor struggling14 booby bard15

And his pretentious lyre.”

[John Hayward]

Notes
  1. 1.

    ‘So if you long for your son or your friend at a time when they aren’t given to you, you’re longing for a fig in winter, believe me’ (Epictetus, Discourses III. 24. 87).

  2. 2.

    A firkin, a container for cask ale, holds 72 pints.

  3. 3.

    JDH note: ‘One Alan Cameron, a stout man, who fell in a drunken stupor outside Mr. F’s residence in Oakhill Park, Frognal.’

  4. 4.

    Thomas Nashe’s Have with You to Saffron Walden (1596) is an extremely long (165pp.), withering attack on Dr Gabriel Harvey, who had viciously denounced Nashe to the London authorities for his earlier publication Christ’s Tears (Oct., 1593), with the consequence that Nashe had been sentenced to prison. The acrimonious Nashe, a friend of Shakespeare, felt Harvey had ‘welneare betrayed me to infamie eternall’.

  5. 5.

    First penned by Francis Quarles (1592–1644) and published in his posthumous collection Shepheards’ Oracles (1646), this Cavalier ballad ‘Hey, Then, Up Go We’ was modified by the writer and playwright Thomas Durfey, or d’Urfey (c. 1653–1723), for his Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719), which featured the refrain in the form ‘And Hey, boys, up go we’.

  6. 6.

    Emily Bronte, ‘Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee!’ (ll. 9–12):

    Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers

    From those brown hills have melted into spring –

    Faithful indeed is the spirit that remembers

    After such years of change and suffering!

  7. 7.

    Genesis 1: 26: ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’

  8. 8.

    Tokay is a naturally sweet wine from the region around Tokaj, Hungary.

  9. 9.

    JDH note: ‘Mr. F.’

  10. 10.

    JDH note: ‘This verse recalls many practical jokes made at Mr. F.’s expense by his colleagues.’

  11. 11.

    JDH note: ‘During his Welsh vacations Mr. F., chairman of F. & F., would read Homer in church of a Sunday.’

  12. 12.

    Worcester Pearmain is an early-season English apple, originating (as the name suggests) from Worcester in the 1870s, with a notable strawberry flavour.

  13. 13.

    Shakespeare, Hamlet, III. iv. 205–7:

    … let it work,

    For ’tis the sport to have the enginer

    Hoist with his own petar[d]

  14. 14.

    John Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818), Bk III, ll. 658–9:

    … I beheld the wreck;

    The final gulphing; the poor struggling souls.

  15. 15.

    The booby bird derives its name from the Spanish word ‘bobo’, meaning foolish or simple.