The very next night our anchorite
Of the Flowing Bowl drank long and deep.
He argued this wise: “New Thought applies
No fitter to lamb than it does to sheep.”
When he woke at morn with a head forlorn
And a taste akin to a parrot’s cage,
He knelt and prayed, then up and flayed
His sinful flesh in a righteous rage.
Whacketty-whack on breast and back,
Whacketty-whack, before, behind;
But he held the thought as he laid it on,
“Pain is merely a state of mind.”
Whacketty-whack on breast and back,
Whacketty-whack on calf and shin;
And the lay-brothers said, with a wag of the head,
“Ain’t he the glutton for discipline!”
Now every night our anchorite
Was exceedingly tight when he went to bed.
The scourge that once pained him no longer restrained him,
Nor even the fear of an aching head.
For he woke at morn with a pate as clear
As the silvery chime of the matin bell;
And without any jogging he fell to his flogging,
And larruped himself in his lonely cell.
But the leather had lost its power to sting;
To pangs of the flesh he was now immune;
His rough hair shirt no longer hurt,
Nor the pebbles he wore in his wooden shoon.
When conscience was troubled he cheerfully doubled
His matinal dose of discipline;—
A deuce of a scourging, sufficient for purging
The Devil himself of original sin.