DID WILLIAM KNOW WHAT A WORD'S WORTH?
Bill was frantic
To be a Romantic;
And looking at the situation empirically,
Romantic is just what he was (lyrically).
Big fancy words would never awe him,
But Bill truly was a scholar, which
You would believe if you saw him
Working his way through Coleridge.
Bill's "Ode to Immortality"
Mirrored his own reality.
"This life," says he, is a "birth and a forgetting:"
The "forgetting" came 80 years later, is what I'm betting.
Wordworth's worthy words remind us that he
Was one of the
Oldtimers
Who suffered from "Alzheimers."
Bill said babies come to earth "trailing clouds of glory."
But that is quite another story,
Best left to theologians and gynecologists...
Or better yet, to meteorologists.
CLAP LOUDER ! THE COMPOSER IS GOING DEAF...
Ofttimes, the air in May is cloven
With the symphonies of Beethoven.
But in his later years,
Neither of Ludwig's ears
Could pick up the beat.
(Yes, dear readers, his woofers and his tweeters
Were set in concrete).
The reason for this, it is said,
Goes back to when he used to sit on the floor
And pour
Buckets of ice water over his head...
Wouldn't it be nice to deduce
The reason for such self-abuse?
But if you -- an amateur and a lowly minion --
Were to meet His Composership tomorrow
In order to ask HIS opinion
(For which you might want to borrow
A shovel and a formal tuxedo),
His death and his deafness would impede, so
You would not succeed, so
I think he'd be quite miffed.
But if your question were:
"Which symphony do critics prefer?"
I'd have to take the Fifth.
AN AVOGADRO SALAD
There was an Italian,
Raised on pasta and scallion,
Who rose from the masses
To count the molecules in gases.
Before him there had been no other businesses
Or individuals that could figure gram-molecular weight.
So it took a brilliant physicist
To calculate
How much gaseous volume
Inside a ballroom
Would fill one mole,
Plus how much temperature and pressure
Are required to bless your
Soul.
If he extrapolated all that from the gas of one cucumber,
He definitely had Avogadro's number.
NAPPY, ARE YOUR FINGERS COLD?
When in search of grand conquest,
Napoleon put his hand inside his vest...
But he was never seen
That way with Josephine.
Napoleon fought his way
Behind the Grande Armée
Until he got to Moscow,
From which he returned... somehow.
When his campaign in Russia was through
(And after pausing to find himself shelved
On the Island of Elba),
Napoleon had his Waterloo.
He was sent to a distant St. Helena home,
Where he expired of a vicious melanome.
Recent tests have brought to bear
Traces of arsenic in his hair:
So all the while
He was in exile,
One of his enemies was finessing the art
Of slowly picking Napoleon's bones apart.