The World’s Wit and Humor: An Encyclopedia in 15 Volumes. 1906.
August Kopisch (1799–1853)The Great Crab of Lake Mohrin
I
But day and night in the lake they peep;
May no good Christian e’er live to see
The day when the monstrous crab gets free!
He’s fastened in the lake there
With fetters down below,
Else would he work the country
A dreadful, dreadful wo!
And oft turns over, and wo’s the day
When once he gets loose—yes, once on land,
No power that can his march withstand!
For, as advancing backward
’S the way with crabs, you know,
Why backward, willy-nilly,
All things with him must go.
The meat you put in your mouth—d’ye see?—
Will not stay there, but straightway trot
Back to the plate, and then to the pot.
The bread will turn to wheat again,
The meal will turn to corn,
And everything will be just what
It was before ’twas born.
Go back to the woods, a rustling tree;
The tree will creep back to a shoot as of yore;
The mortar will turn to lime once more.
The ox will be a calf again,
The calf go back to the cow,
And the cow again, in her turn,
Be what the calf is now.
The shirt being worn will turn to flax,
The flax to linseed change, and then
Under the ground be buried again.
And then the city’s mayor
Will alter quite, they say;
The people all shall see him
A sucking babe that day;
And all the magnificent copyists then;
And the corporation stripped shall be
Of its corporate capacity.
The master on the school-bench
Will sit, a scholar small—
In short, the world grow back
To children, one and all.
And each, with Adam, be a clod.
The feathered folk will longest exist,
And then, like the rest, will cease to resist.
The hen will be a chicken,
And into the egg crawl back,
Which the great crab instanter
With his long tail will crack.
The world is living and thriving yet;
Good care is observed by the powers that be
That the exiled old crab shall never be free.
Just think how my poor ditty
Would come to a wretched fate,
Drawn through Fame’s trumpet’s mouthpiece,
Back to the inkhorn straight!