‘Twas brillig, and I babbled guff
Until my listeners cried “Enough!”
And stopped my gob with a plug of dough
And then it was that I knew woe.

A woe such as I’d never known
Not e’en when I was skin and bone
In starveling days of pimply youth
Before I grew so fat forsooth

Fat and loud and babbling guff
All roister doister swagger and puff
Puffed up like one of those eerie toads
That leap at you from beside the roads

Well, at least, they leap at moi
I wrote of them in my memoir
The text of which is what I brayed
Hoping to make my listeners afraid

Instead they plugged my gob with dough
And brought me down so very low
That now my life is full of woe
And it is time for me to go

Go where? To the seaside I suppose
To my seaside chalet o’ prose
To thump my typewriter’s leaden keys
And write of hornets, wasps, and bees