R They wash their ...

I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia. [Eliot's note] One of the less bawdy versions of the song, which was popular among Australian troops in World War I, went as follows:

O the moon shines bright on Mrs. Porter
And on the daughter
Of Mrs. Porter.
They wash their feet in soda water
And so they oughter
To keep them clean. (NA)

reference topics

  Title of “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”Title of "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" linguistic analysis The syntactic parallelism of the title is striking, and in that particularly the presence of a colon. The syntactic structures of the title's two constituents are exactly the same -…Click for the full annotation →
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