“Like to the thund’ring tone of unspoke speeches, . . .
Or like the gray freeze of a crimson cat, . . .
Or like a shadow when the sunne is gone, . . .

Like to the greene fresh fading withered rose, . . .
Even such is man, who dy’d and then did laffe
To see such strange lines writ on’s Epitaph.”

—Richard Corbett, from Nonsense. The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse, edited by Tom Paulin, 1988.