If these are not the exact horrid words, this is the way they come back to me, giving a lilt to vindictive spud work.
At another time, the apparent futility of all efforts to come even with the task at hand will evoke some such iterative lines as Cyrano’s dying vision of eternally resurging enemies:
_Je sais/bien qu’à/la fin/vous me/mettrez/à bas N’impor/te, je/me bats/, je me/bats, je/me bats!_
This sort of absolutely incongruous haunting is an instance of what Hoffmann would have fondly called the _Zusammeverhängniss der Dinge_ or “fatally-concatenated-mutual-interdependency” of things! Mythological images rising vaguely from the clouds of school memories; the lilt of that Walrus and Carpenter verse parodied a thousand times; an American jingle never recalled since it was first casually read and dismissed on a railway journey; and the magniloquent _panache_ lines of Rostand—all dropping in irrelevantly from some distant and forgotten corner of the past into this garden, all à propos of spud work and linking itself with it!
For instance, to-day ‹one of the three longest in the year, for, in the coming morn, about five o’clock, our summer solstice will have taken place›, as I spudded away at the fern, thirstily and perspiringly, my haunting iteration was alternately of images wide as the poles asunder. One was of those puzzling lines, in Boileau’s heroicomic poem _Le Lutrin_, anent the barber who
... _d’une main legère Tient un verre de vin qui rit dans la fougère._
The other was of Gadshill boast: “We steal as in a castle, cock-sure: we have the receipt of fern-seed”—which irresistibly, by concatenation, brought in the image of my dear if disreputable old friend Falstaff and how he would have “larded the lean earth” as he spudded along. Now it occurs to me that if the receipt of fern-seed as handed down by tradition is in any way correct, this is the last day when this fern massacre can be of any use, as far as Villino Loki is concerned, to prevent its propagation for this year. Is not to-morrow St. John’s Eve; and is not that the date upon which the invisible seed—which once successfully gathered will confer upon the gatherer the power of invisibility—drops upon the soil?