A Tale of Thwarted Love
The college Bursar went to see
If a beautiful pea-green boat,
With lots of money (and jars of honey)
Was really afloat in the moat:
But what surmise could predict his surprise
As he gazed on that moonlit scene:
Was it tiredness or drink, or insanity's brink,
Or was it his colleague, the Dean?
The latter was clad, or so rumour had,
(for the truth is that no-one else saw)
In a large pair of wings, and straightway he sings
To the Bursar aquake on the shore:-
“When Summer it comes
And cummerbunds bounds
On the waists of young girls on the green,
Then dons, ducks and geese
March down to the beach
Where the Nougat-tree's bloom is obscene.
When the cummerbunds come
Abundant this summer.
Let's pack up a suitcase and fleen
Where the dons they can't get us
And the natives will let us
Be just as we were and have been.”
Now the Bursar was sad, to see the Dean mad
But he ordered the man to the bank;
When the Dean he refused, he felt quite abused,
Stepped out on the lilies and - sank.
When he came up for air, the surface was bare
And the Dean just a speck in the sky;
And up to this day, there's no-one can say
Which way he went, how, where or why.
And now, late at night, his office locked tight,
When the moon lights his sheets with her sheen,
The Bursar in bed, to his work-quotas wed-
How he wishes he'd gone with the Dean!
