Page:Poems (Edward Thomas, 1917).djvu/39

 For reasons of his own to him the wren

Is Jenny Pooter. Before all other men

'Twas he first called the Hog's Back the Hog's Back.

That Mother Dunch's Buttocks should not lack

Their name was his care. He too could explain

Totteridge and Totterdown and Juggler's Lane:

He knows, if anyone. Why Tumbling Bay,

Inland in Kent, is called so, he might say.

"But little he says compared with what he does.

If ever a sage troubles him he will buzz

Like a beehive to conclude the tedious fray:

And the sage, who knows all languages, runs away.

Yet Lob has thirteen hundred names for a fool,

And though he never could spare time for school

To unteach what the fox so well expressed,

On biting the cock's head off,—Quietness is best,—

He can talk quite as well as anyone

After his thinking is forgot and done.

He first of all told someone else's wife,

For a farthing she'd skin a flint and spoil a knife

Worth sixpence skinning it. She heard him speak:

'She had a face as long as a wet week'

Said he, telling the tale in after years.

With blue smock and with gold rings in his ears,

Sometimes he is a pedlar, not too poor

To keep his wit. This is tall Tom that bore

The logs in, and with Shakespeare in the hall

Once talked, when icicles hung by the wall.

As Herne the Hunter he has known hard times.

On sleepless nights he made up weather rhymes

Which others spoilt. And, Hob being then his name,

He kept the hog that thought the butcher came 33