Textual Pornography

The Farmer (1887?)

(hover over underlined words for annotations)

Once on a time he used to plough
And rise at dawn to milk the cough,
And drive with merry song and laugh
To pasture Brindle and her caugh.

Then for the pigs he’d fill the trough,
And for the market he’d be ough;
Sometimes, his mare would bruise her hough
Against a fence-post or a rough.

And there he’d switch her with a bough
To teach her better anyhough.
He planted wheat to make the dough,
Which, in drought, was hard to grough.

In winter, when his work was through,
A little sporting he would dough.
He’d wander with his gun and shough
And aim at crows he couldn’t knough.

Sometimes he’d hunt along the slough
For birds that do not live there nough,
And shoot a seagull or a crough,
Which he with joy would proudly shough.

From swamp land, watered by a lough,
He made good pasture for his stough,
By laying here and there a sough,
While perspiration wet his brough.

Sometimes a snake that shed it slough
Would scare him so he’d run and pough
Till stuck knee-deep within a slough,
He’d yell until he raised a rough.

But rough work makes the farmer cough,
And, careless hough much people scough,
He lives on boarders rough and tough,
Whough vough theigh dough not eat enough.

– Oil City Derrick.

About “The Farmer”

The Reno Gazette-Journal runs a small feature called “Today in History,” where it reprints something that was published on this day in a previous year. It’s usually a blurb from an article or an advertisement, no more than a paragraph, but it’s usually pretty fun to read, especially when they go with some old-timey stuff.

In Wednesday, February 24th’s edition, they reprinted an ad that originally ran in 1890. I wanted to show my friend Colin the ad, but I didn’t feel like typing it all out, so I hit the Googles with a phrase from it to see if it was present somewhere on the internet. And, luckily for me, the NEGenWeb Project exists. They have a pretty rad library of transcribed and scanned books, journals, atlases, etc. published in Nebraska. One of them, the special “immigrant issue” of the Nebraska State Journal (now the Lincoln Journal Star), published on June 5, 1887, contained the same ad. You can see the ad on this page, under the header “TO WEAK MEN.”

Because it was available, and also because old newspapers are awesome, I read more of what they’ve put up on the site from it. On the same page as the ad was a poem called “The Farmer,” credited to the Oil City Derrick, a paper which is now simply called the Derrick. There’s no information on the poem beyond that, such as who wrote it, or where it was originally published (if it wasn’t the OCD). I could only find one other record of the poem: it was also published in the November 19, 1887 edition of the Tuapeka Times of New Zealand. That site has a scan of the poem, which I used to supplement the NEGenWeb transcription, because the latter seems to have numerous typos.

I thought the poem was hella awesome, so I decided to print it here. Colin rightfully pointed out that the wordplay is pretty similar to Ogden Nash’s, although Nash was born at least fifteen years after “The Farmer” was written. All of the annotations are mine.