In his early teens Harry, intending to further his plans for perfecting the world, tried to learn a universal second language from Montagu Butler's Step by Step in Esperanto.  He failed - but more than 60 years later still recalls the footnotes which paraphrase popular proverbs as polysyllabic poems.  We are delighted to share their sesquipedalian sagacity with you, by kind permission of the Esperanto League for North America.

The early worm goes forth with zeal
To give the hungry bird a meal.
His brother has no such intention,
And lives to draw his old age pension.

	Desiccated herbage must submit to perturbation
	While the radiant orb of day affords illumination

Inhabitants of domiciles of vitreous formation
with lapidary projectiles should make no rash jactation.

	A single member of the avian race
	That the prehensile digits fast embrace
	The mercantile equivalent achieves
	Of two at large amid arboreal leaves.

Who sums the yet unfractured shells of bipeds gallinaceous
Is apt to find his calculations woefully fallacious.

Where fluvial aggregations lie
Uncorrugated to the eye
Their currents, one infers, may be
Impressive in profundity.

	A futile superfluity of culinary aid
	Will mar the gastronomic juice of osseous tissue made.

	Teach not your parent's mother to extract
	The embryo juices of an egg by suction:
	That good old lady can the feat enact
	Quite irrespective of your kind instruction!

Thinking thine equine friend in noontide heat
Draughts from the cool and rippling rill desires,
Stand not amazed, if the ungrateful beast
Merely to see his mirrored face aspires.

	Miscalculations multitudinous
	Co-operate with utter malice
	Twixt labial orifice and chalice
	To shatter all the hopes imbued in us.

Environment is to congruous be
In greater or even less degree,
But none so gratifies as that
Which constitutes one's habitat.

	The ferrous form is more than warm
	And ruddy glowings light it:
	Don't wait until it starts to chill,
	But smite it!

Bear not to glutted cellars near the Tyne
The carbonaceous products of the mine.

	Your immediate environment submit to circumspection,
	Ere you alter your locality by muscular projection.

	It is permitted to the feline race
	To contemplate at ease a royal face.

Observe yon ovine innocent
When stripped of his integument!
For him kind Providence ne'er fails
To moderate hiemal gales.

	While self-inspection it neglects,
	Nor its own foul condition sees,
	The pot unto the pan objects
	Its sooty superficies.

For good measure, here is a nursery rhyme:   

Scintillate, scintillate, globule lucific,
Fain would I fathom thy nature specific.
Loftily poised in aether capacious,
Strongly resembling a gem carbonaceous.


Read Harry's Great Thoughts and other epigrams