Who Killed Cock Robin?

Who killed Cock Robin 

"Who killed Cock Robin?"

 "I," said the Sparrow,

"With my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin."

"Who saw him die?" 

"I," said the Fly,

"With my little eye, I saw him die."

"Who caught his blood?" 

"I," said the Fish,

"With my little dish, I caught his blood."

"Who'll make the shroud?"

 "I," said the Beetle,

"With my thread and needle, I'll make the shroud."

"Who'll dig his grave?"

 "I," said the Owl,

"With my pick and shovel, I'll dig his grave."

"Who'll be the parson?" 

"I," said the Rook,

"With my little book, I'll be the parson."

"Who'll be the clerk?"

 "I," said the Lark,

"If it's not in the dark, I'll be the clerk."

"Who'll carry the link?"

 "I," said the Linnet,

"I'll fetch it in a minute, I'll carry the link."

"Who'll be chief mourner?"

 "I," said the Dove,

"I mourn for my love, I'll be chief mourner."

"Who'll carry the coffin?" 

"I," said the Kite,

"If it's not through the night, I'll carry the coffin."

"Who'll bear the pall?" 

"We," said the Wren,

"Both the cock and the hen, we'll bear the pall."

"Who'll sing a psalm?" 

"I," said the Thrush,

As she sat on a bush, "I'll sing a psalm."

"Who'll toll the bell?" 

"I," said the bull,

"Because I can pull, I'll toll the bell."

All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,

When they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin

Poor Cock Robin.

In memory of Robin Goodfellow.

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My beautiful! my beautiful!

'Arab's Farewell to his Horse'

Transcription

Arab's Farewell to his Horse.

PRICE ONE PENNY.

Copies of this popular production can always be had in

the Poet's box

My beautiful! my beautiful! that standest meekly by,

With thy proudly arch'd and glossy neck, and dark and fiery

eye,

Fret not to roam the desert now with all thy winged speed,

I may not mount on thee again-thou art sold, my Arab

steed.

Fret not with that impatient hoof, snuff not the breezy wind,

The further that thou fliest now, so far am I behind.

The stranger hath thy bridle rein-thy master hath his gold-

Fleet limbed and beautiful, farewell, thou'rt sold, my steed,

thou'rt sold.

Farewell, these free untired limbs full many a mile must

roam,

To reach the chill and wintry sky which clouds the stran-

ger's home.

Some other hand, less fond, must now thy corn and bed

prepare-

The silky mane I braided once must be another's care.

The morning sun shall dawn again, but never more with thee

Shall I gallop through the desert paths where we were wont

to be.

Evening shall darken on the earth, and o'er the sandy plain,

Some other steed, with slower step, shall bear me home

again.

Yes, thou must go, the wild free breeze, the brilliant sun

and sky,

Thy master's home, from all of these my exiled one must fly.

Thy proud dark eye will grow less proud, thy step become

less fleet,

And vainly shalt thou arch thy neck thy master's hand to

meet.

Only in sleep shall I behold that dark eye glancing bright;

Only in sleep shall hear again that step so firm and light;

And when I raise my dreaming arm to check and cheer thy

speed,

Then must I startling wake to feel thou'rt sold, my Arab

steed.

Ah! rudely then, unseen by me, some cruel hand may chide,

Till foam-wreathes lie, like crested waves, along thy panting

side,

And the rich blood that is in thee swells in thy indignant

pain,

Till careless eyes, which rest on thee, may count each started

vein.

Will they ill-use thee? If I thought-but no it cannot be-

Thou art so swift yet easy curbed, so gentle yet so free.

And yet, if haply when thou'rt gone, my lonely heart should

yearn,

Can the hand which casts thee from it now command thee

to return?

Return, alas! my Arab steed, what shall thy master do,

When thou who wert his all of joy hath vanished from his

view;

When the dim distance cheats mine eye, and, through the

gathering tears,

Thy bright form for a moment like the false mirage appears,

Slow and unmounted will I roam, with weary foot alone,

Where with fleet step and joyous bound thou oft has borne

me on.

And sitting down by that green well I'll pause and sadly

think,

It was here he bowed his glossy neck when last I saw him

drink.

When last I saw thee drink? Away! the fevered dream is

o'er,

I could not live a day and know that we should meet no

more.

They tempted me, my beautiful! for hunger' s power is strong,

They tempted me, my beautiful! but I have loved too long.

Who said that I'd giv'n thee up, who said that thou wert

sold?

'Tis false, 'tis false, my Arab steed, I fling them back their

gold;

Thus, thus, I leap upon thy back and scour the distant plains,

Away! who overtakes us now shall claim thee for his pains!

Commentary This ballad begins: 'My beautiful! my beautiful! that standest meekly by, / With thy proudly arch'd and glossy neck, and dark and fiery eye'. This broadside was priced at one penny and published on Saturday, 5th June 1869. It was published by the Poet's Box, (probably Glasgow) but the town of publication has been obscured. Although it is not attributed on the broadside, this poem was written by Caroline Norton (1808-77). Norton was the granddaughter of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). Her first published poetry appeared in 1829 and as a result she became a successful magazine editor. She found further fame as a political poet and pamphleteer, but also a certain amount of notoriety when it was alleged that she had been having an affair with the Whig Home Secretary Lord Melbourne. The claims were made by Norton's husband, a Tory who was known to be violent toward her. Norton's unhappy marriage influenced her political activism, which contributed to the Marriage and Law Act of 1857. The Poet?s Box in Glasgow operated from 1849 to 1911. Matthew Leitch was the proprietor at 6 St. Andrew Lane?s, a narrow street on the south side of Gallowgate, from 1850 to 1858. His son William Munsie Leitch worked at the same address from 1859 to 1865 and at varous addresses in London Street until 1911. Many of the broadsides published by the Glasgow Poet?s Box were dated and some carried advertisements, not just for printed items but also for shoe blacking and ?soap for lovers?! Like the other ?boxes? in Dundee and Edinburgh, the Glasgow one sold love songs, sea shanties, parodies and dialogues. It is not clear what the connection between the different Poet?s Boxes were. They almost certainly sold each other?s sheets. It is known that John Sanderson in Edinburgh often wrote to the Leitches in Glasgow for songs and that later his brother Charles obtained copies of songs from the Dundee Poet?s Box. There was also a Poet?s Box in Belfast from 1846 to 1856 at the address of the printer James Moore, and one in Paisley in the early 1850s owned by William Anderson. Broadsides are single sheets of paper, printed on one side, to be read unfolded. They carried public information such as proclamations as well as ballads and news of the day. Cheaply available, they were sold on the streets by pedlars and chapmen. Broadsides offer a valuable insight into many aspects of the society they were published in, and the National Library of Scotland holds over 250,000 of them.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. I decided to leave these rather boring notes attached, because? I was so intrigued by? all the? question marks. I suppose they were meant to represent some? other kind of punctuation mark, but I can't quite? figure out which one. My favorite passage is:

Many of the broadsides published by the Glasgow Poet?s Box were dated and some carried advertisements, not just for printed items but also for shoe blacking and ?soap for lovers?! Like the other ?boxes? in Dundee and Edinburgh, the Glasgow one sold love songs, sea shanties, parodies and dialogues

"Soap for lovers?!". These people were obviously well ahead of their time.

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Robin and Terry: the two

All morning, still in mourning, still unable to figure it out, but I found this lovely photo of two of the greatest, craziest geniuses of our time. No doubt understood each other better because of it.

I cannot believe it, but no one on Facebook is saying anything about the fact that Robin Williams was coping with a Parkinson's diagnosis when he died. Already he was showing the wasting and masked face that come with it, indicating it may have been progressing very quickly. And oh, imagine a man like that imprisoned in his own body, unable to speak. Did he do this while he still could?

Some time later today, DUH, someone might say GEE, there's a thing on the news on Robin Williams! But by then I will have sunk pretty deep, and felt pretty much alone.

The Church of the Holy Sea-Monkey

So it turns out that the bizarre site called The Sea Monkey Worship Page is still up, but hasn't been updated since 2008. Hm. Six years or so. That's a long time for our Sea-Monks to go without sustenance. I was able to enlarge and enhance the tiny little ugly banner, which now doesn't look too bad, and am thinking of trying to use it on my FB page, but we'll see.

There truly are people obsessed with Sea-Monkeys. The creatures themselves are so inexplicably hideous that the whole thing baffles me a bit. Those TV ads were jaw-dropping. OK, they're just little wiggly brine shrimp with no more feeling or intelligence than an amoeba. But does that mean it's OK to force them to swim against currents in these grotesque plastic tracks, supposedly representing fox hunts and cycling races?Yet people must have bought these things. They still do.

The product was initially called Instant Life, a more accurate label because these little wigglers emerge from a packet of dessicated eggs. It's not so miraculous to see this happen, many species can go dormant in the egg phase for a very long time. At first they look sort of like baby guppies, not so bad, until all those furry-looking legs start swarming around, and that brown stuff inside them - God, is it shit, or eggs, or WHAT?

This business about training them, I honestly don't know. If you force them to swim along a track or down a pipe, is that "training" or mere survival? What choice do they have? This is Sea-Monkey enslavement and should be cause for a visit from the Sea-Monkey Police.

(You thought you'd get away without gifs? Really? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!)

This guy looks like he has a severe case of Sea-Monkey acne. And is there really a site called www.sea-monkey.com? I'd better check it out.

For some reason the Sea-Monkey gang reminds me of nothing more than Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead and Moose.

Or is that Maynard G. Krebbs?

Showing those slimy little bastards in the background represents Truth in Advertising (I guess). But I think the kiddies are still being sincerely deluded.

Sea-Monkeys: so eager to please

Honest to bloody God, I was going to postpone this 'til tomorrow or just forget all about it, being tired and crampy and out of sorts. But more and more evidence kept piling up. I went from one bizarre manifestation to another. You can still get these things, see - in fact I think a couple of my grandkids experimented with them. Which is what they are - a science experiment, or at least a biology experiment. These little suckers might be interesting to watch under a microscope. My brother similarly kept amoebae and paramecia in his room, feeding them on Brewer's yeast that was the most disgusting-smelling stuff that ever existed.

Being a kid of the '60s who read comics a lot (especially Archie, True Romance, Prince Valiant, and the nice fat Jimmy Olsen Annual that we always took to the cottage in the summer), I was aware of these sorts of ads. They looked absolutely brilliant and magical, and of course I never sent away for them. I never sent away for anything. Not Onion Gum. Not the Joy Buzzer. Not X-Ray Specs.The addresses were American and intimidating, and besides, I could never scrape together $1.25. It all went on Pixy Stix, sherbet fountains, Danish troll dolls, Beatles cards, and whatever else obsessed me at the time..

So I knew about these things, I was aware they existed, but it was a long time until I found out what they really were. I didn't see how these plump little creatures could emerge from a seemingly lifeless dry powder, as the ads claimed. Well, they didn't. They didn't lounge around on the patio sipping daiquiris and keeping up with the Sea-Monkey Joneses, either. The truth was far more sinister.

Though there were all sorts of these depictions, usually featuring beaming families with majestic castles in the background, I was suspicious. I was born suspicious, and it has served me better than any other trait I possess. So inevitably, the truth began to leak out. A friend of my brother's DID send away, and boy was he disappointed. Hardly anything hatched out, but what did hatch out was more like this:

It didn't seem to matter, because by then a whole Sea-Monkey Universe had sprung up, with competitive cycling, fox hunts, Olympic diving, swimsuit competitions etc. Whether or not this was fair to the organisms involved was debatable.

One of the most fascinating bits of Sea-Monkeyana I found was this thing that looks like a Christmas tree ornament. I thought: oh God, please - surely not! It turned out to be a bauble you can wear around your neck. How you get the Sea-Monkeys in there is anybody's guess, unless they hatch out inside it. Your friends would run screaming.

It took a long time for me to find the whole ad, but in my usual bloodhound fashion, I tracked it down. It's hard to read the bleary text, but we don't really have to. Our Sea-Monkey friends, still grinning hilariously, are crammed into this little ampule thing, not seeming to notice that they will soon suffocate. It's puzzling that in the smaller ad the Sea-Monkeys are green, a strange thing because the poses are exactly the same. (In fact, this is the only time I've seen Sea-Monkeys that aren't sickly pink.)

Though the paraphernalia has been somewhat modernized, Sea-Monkeys are just as hokey as ever. There's some sort of wrist capsule you can put them in, subjecting them to the same sort of torture as with that necklace thingie. They have become "cool" on the internet, leading to such bizarre phenomena as the Sea-Monkey Worship site. This has got to be the strangest site I've ever seen, if not the ugliest, but it has bad poetry about Sea-Monkeys in it, so it ain't all bad. Check it out, why don't you:

http://www.seamonkeyworship.com/

There was an overabundance of  material on this subject, although a few years ago there was hardly any. I found LOTS of pictures of people dressed up like Sea-Monkeys. Most of them were so plug-ugly I didn't include them, but this chick, whoever she is, is rather fetching. For a Sea-Monkey.

These would appear to be animated Sea-Monkeys from South Park and (I think) The Simpsons, in which the family refuses to behave like the promised Bowlfull of Happiness. Bowlfull of Angst is more like it.

"So eager to please," goes the copy, "they can even be trained." Trained to crash into each other?

Trying to "train" these, get them to ski or ride bicycles or do any of the other tricks in those ads, is kind of like trying to teach a sperm to walk. These things have about the same mentality. I mean, a sperm knows enough to swim upstream - or swim somewhere (actually, like Sea-Monkeys, I think they just swim randomly), and that's it, that's their whole bag of tricks. Sperm are sort of alive. Aren't they? Good God, of course they are, or there wouldn't be a human race! (Come to that, I wish they WEREN'T such good swimmers, but never mind). So if they're alive, do they have a brain? Do they have a nucleus, even, anything at all that drives them, that makes them "go" in their spermy little way? Ah, uh, probably not. So if the very essence of life, or half of it anyway, has no brain, WHAT SORT OF BRAIN DO THESE LITTLE BUGGERS HAVE? Dick-all!

The colors may be gaudier, the ads sexier, and the cost inflated, but a brine shrimp is still a brine shrimp. You might be able to make a mosquito jump through a hoop, but seriously - would you want to try?

Sea Monkeys Bad Poetry

Don't Spill My Monkeys

Oh No, here comes Rhakeem looking for some gold
Now he has spilled my monkeys, they were only 1 hour old
Now Sasha comes along thinking it some silly game
She turns the tank upside down and makes sea monkey rain
Nancy thinks its a snow globe and she stops by to shake it
I don't know if my poor sea monkeys are ever gonna make it
Please don't touch my monkeys, or spill them anymore
I started out with sixty, now I have only three or four
Stay away from the aquarium if you know what's best
I don't want any more sea monkeys dying in a puddle on my desk

Submitted by Jason Pauley

Sea-Monkey gone!

My Sea-Monkeys have simply gone!
Disappeared, forgotten, had the gong.
Oh, look! There in the water see;
One just as happy as can be!
There's another! I'm happy too.
"Now I can live well, just for you!"
"There are two more of your kind,
That I myself have managed to find."
Four! My grief has turned to joy!
"You each will have a different toy."

Written by Jill S. M. Hunter. You can see my stories at the Wall O' Grief

Untitled

I have a batch of Sea Monks,
I love them so, I do,
they swim around, swim
in circles above their little
green tank, so green, and
I love to watch you, to see
your little bodies swimming,
and to see your eyes, your
tiny little eyes, staring,
staring, staring at me
through the plastic that
is your home, oh how
I love you so,
my strange little pets

Submitted by Jeremy Stark

Untitled non-rhyming couplet

roses are red,
sea monkies are not

Submitted by Kali

Untitled free verse poem

sacred monkey of the sea
eternal friend of me
a little fish you are not

monkey you are!
oh, how i yearn to be your pal
never leave me, little gal
keep me in your heart and soul
ever swimming in your bowl (tank)
yippiee!

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Tally-ho! It's the Sea-Monkey Fox Hunt!

I wasn't going to write about Robin Williams

. . . because I did so already, angrily, because waste makes me angry, as does grief . . . because I wrote something last night that was so off-the-wall and extreme that I deleted it this morning. . . because I have some sort of medical thing that has me in extreme and excruciating pain in waves, so I tell myself, soon be over. . . soon be over. . . 

I had a thought. Everyone's having thoughts about these things now, because there it is, out in the open. It isn't just his endless need or requirement to be entertaining every second. It was the sheer volume of work, the movies, so many of them classics, back to back to back - WHO could maintain that level of intensity and not crack and drain out the bottom? That last photo of him was horrifying. He stood in the Dairy Queen, his face grey, probably twenty or thirty pounds underweight. There was no expression on his face. The staff in the Dairy Queen did not recognize him. What happened?

No one uses the term "burnout" any more. It's an expression that was popular oh, some time in the '80s, was it? It means - well, I don't need to explain what it means, do I? Frazzled wires, blown fuses, so much energy forced through the system, so far beyond its carrying capacity, that one day the whole thing blows up or melts down.

He was simply done. Or thought he was. The vessel was empty. I remember a line from Bob Dylan: "as you stare into the vacuum of his eyes". He was in the minuses now, so tapped out that you could see through him. He could walk through walls and haunt people before he was even dead.

Several times since the news, I've flipped into a frilly and frizzled state that I recognize all too well, the gaiety of grief, a mini-mania that can actually be quite enjoyable. Except that it isn't, and just under it is an exhaustion so profound that you can't begin to describe it. Times a million, and maybe you've got his plight. No one could do what he did, and then, at the very end, he couldn't either.

O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! My Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

Here captain! dear father!

This arm beneath your head;

It is some dream that on the deck,

You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;

Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!

But I, with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.