Everybody's dead, Terence

[marnanel]

[murder, suicide, execution]

Two parodies of A E Housman's "A Shropshire Lad" that I found on Wikipedia. (They're dead, Terence, everybody's dead, everybody is dead, Terence.)

by Humbert Wolfe:

When lads have done with labour
In Shropshire, one will cry
"Let's go and kill a neighbour,"
And t'other answers "Aye!"
So this one kills his cousins,
And that one kills his dad;
And, as they hang by dozens
At Ludlow, lad by lad,
Each of them one-and-twenty,
All of them murderers,
The hangman mutters: "Plenty
Even for Housman's verse."

by Hugh Kingsmill:

What, still alive at twenty-two,
A clean upstanding chap like you?
Why, if your throat is hard to slit,
Slit your girl's and swing for it!
Like enough you won't be glad
When they come to hang you, lad,
But bacon's not the only thing
That's cured by hanging from a string.
When the blotting pad of night
Sucks the latest drop of light,
Lads whose job is still to do
Shall whet their knives and think of you.