Line 992:  held up by Our Cream

This is not quite exact.  In the advertisements to which it refers, the whiskers are held up by a bubbly foam, not by a creamy substance.

After this line, instead of lines 923-930, we find the following, lightly deleted, variant:

All artists have been born in what they call

A sorry age: mine is the worst of all:

An age that thinks spacebombs and spaceships take

A genius with a foreign name to make,

When any jackass can rig up the stuff;

An age in which a pack of rogues can bluff

The selenographer; a comic age

That sees in Dr. Schweitzer a great sage.

Having struck this out, the poet tried another theme, but these lines he also canceled:

England where poets flew the highest, now

Wants them to plod and Pegasus to plough;

Now the prosemongers of the Grubby Group,

The Message Man, the owlish Nincompoop

And all the Social Novels of our age

Leave but a pinch of coal dust on the page.

Back Next