Paschal moon: bears, gowns & sarpints

Even though antics of the Klown Kar swirling around the White House provides sufficient laughs for a couple of decades, I think it’s time for something genuinely, harmlessly silly.

So, Edward Lear.

There was an Old Man on a hill,

Who seldom, if ever, stood still;

He ran up and down,

In his Grandmother’s gown,

Which adorned that Old Man on a hill.

(TBH, going all round the town in women’s clothes isn’t that much of a big deal where I come from. In fly-over country, though…)

There was an Old Man with a flute,

A sarpint ran into his boot;

But he played daay and night,

Till the sarpint took flight,

And avoided that man with a flute.

And here’s a version of the one about the Old Person from Ware (which my great-grandmother used to recite to us)—used in one of those periodicals for kids, Puzzle-Fun Comics, Spring 1946: