In Venice, on a small peninsula formed by the meeting of two canals, stands the church of Santa Maria della Salute, bearing a statue of the Virgin Mary. Further out stand statues of Atlas and Fortune. And on the very tip of the point there used to stand a solitary cast-iron lamppost, on whose base was inscribed the legend FONDERIA DI FERRO IN VENEZIA DI THEODOR E HASSELQUIST. This tableau inspired John Sparrow, former Warden of All Souls College, to write a memorable poem:

See the Saviour Queen on high,
Crowned with stars against the sky!
Poised in her appointed place
Gravely she dispenses grace,
While, the pattern to repeat,
From the dome beneath her feet
Flows the marble, fold on fold,
Convoluted, white and cold.
Close at hand a patient pair
On their backs the planet bear;
Atlas bends beneath the strain,
Fortune flaunts her golden vane:
Lucid in the moonlight pale,
Gleams the globe and shifts the sail.

While aloft in ranks serene,
Serving their celestial queen,
Countless constellations bright
Circumnavigate the night,
Two poor earth-bound slaves below
Where the sea-fogs settle slow,
Stationed on the shadowy ledge
That defines the water’s edge,
Lift their lantern through the mist —
Theodor and Hasselquist.

Air and water, sky and stone,
Need foundations not their own:
How can they subsist alone?
I, their structure to sustain,
Recompose them in my brain
Endlessly, but all in vain.
Air and water, stone and sky,
No less mortal they than I,
Human Atlas, doomed to die.

Yet there stirs within my breast
Something not to be suppressed,
Reaching out beyond my reach,
Inexpressible in speech,
Dumb presentiment of prayer
To the Queen of night and air:

When the globe dissolves for me
And the land is lost in sea,
When I cross the last lagoon
Starless, and without a moon,
Faithful still beneath the dome
Be they there to light me home,
Shining from the farther shore —
Hasselquist and Theodor.

(Via John Julius Norwich, More Christmas Crackers, 1990.)

The Chief Defect of Henry King
Was chewing little bits of String.
At last he swallowed some which tied
Itself in ugly Knots inside.

Physicians of the Utmost Fame
Were called at once; but when they came
They answered, as they took their Fees,
“There is no Cure for this Disease.

“Henry will very soon be dead.”
His Parents stood about his Bed
Lamenting his Untimely Death,
When Henry, with his Latest Breath,

Cried, “Oh, my Friends, be warned by me,
That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch, and Tea
Are all the Human Frame requires …”
With that, the Wretched Child expires.

— Hilaire Belloc

I stole through the dungeons, while everyone slept,
Till I came to the cage where the Monster was kept.
There, locked in the arms of a Giant Baboon,
Rigid and smiling, lay … Mrs. RAVOON!

I climbed the clock-tower in the first morning sun
And ’twas midday at least ere my journey was done;
But the clock never sounded the last stroke of noon,
For there, from the clapper, swung Mrs. RAVOON.

I ran through the marsh ‘midst the lightning and thunder,
When a terrible flash split the darkness asunder.
Chewing a rat’s tail and mumbling a rune,
Mad in the moat, squatted Mrs. RAVOON.

I stood by the waters so green and so thick,
And I stirred at the scum with my old, withered stick;
When there rose through the ooze, like a monstrous balloon,
The bloated cadaver of Mrs. RAVOON.

I hauled in the line, and I took my first look
At the half-eaten horror that hung from the hook.
I had dragged from the depths of the limpid lagoon
The luminous body of Mrs. RAVOON.

Facing the fens, I looked back from the shore
Where all had been empty a moment before;
And there, by the light of the Lincolnshire moon,
Immense on the marshes, stood … Mrs. RAVOON!

After this memorable debut in For Love and Money (1956), Paul Dehn’s macabre character has found her way into songs and poems by many writers, even beyond her creator’s death in 1976. They’re cataloged here.

If all the good people were clever,
And all clever people were good,
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could.

But somehow ’tis seldom or never
The two hit it off as they should,
The good are so harsh to the clever,
The clever, so rude to the good!

So friends, let it be our endeavour
To make each by each understood;
For few can be good, like the clever,
Or clever, so well as the good.

— Elizabeth Wordsworth

In judging others we can see too well
Their grievous fall, but not how grieved they fell;
Judging ourselves, we to our minds recall,
Not how we fell, but how we grieved to fall.

— George Crabbe, “Boys at School,” 1819

Visiting Orchomenus, Greece, in 1810, Lord Byron discovered this entry in the travelers’ book:

Fair Albion, smiling, sees her son depart
To trace the birth and nursery of art:
Noble his object, glorious is his aim;
He comes to Athens, and he — writes his name.

Beneath this Byron wrote:

The modest bard, like many a bard unknown,
Rhymes on our names, but wisely hides his own;
But yet, whoe’er he be, to say no worse,
His name would bring more credit than his verse.