For those of you gullible enough to think that I was really going to do some serious and scholarly work; the poem, complete with glosses, can (as a sort of minimalist sop to you) be found here.

¹ "gloss as I go": probably a popular Disney song not unlike “Whistle While You Work”*

² "a bunch a' wee heedies": a collection of rather small heads—i.e. the fist, a punch.

____________________________
* Now how do the words go?

“Oh whistle while you whistle
“When you're standing out in a drizzle,
“Or even if you're taking tea with the Queen
“And she's handed you a plate full of gristle!”

or something like that.

¹ "... honour of St Patrick" Whose day either just passed or passed so long ago that you wonder why I bring it up now depending on the length of the delay before this is broadcast

² A scientist (if not Science herself) replies:

Hi Richard,
It's always a bit unsettling to find empirical justification for the ideas your essays advance, but once again, you may be right - at least kind of in a hypothetical sense, perhaps.
Some immunologists argue that parents can be overly-zealous by depriving their offspring of "normal" exposure to routine elements of the environment, through under-exposure to dirt, animals, plants and people, and through over-exposure to strong, germicidal cleansers. This can result in a somewhat naive immune system that has not experienced enough of the real biological world to be able to discriminate between legitimate threats (e.g. pathogenic bacteria, viruses and molds) which warrant an immune response, and other substances which are better ignored (e.g. pollen, dust, wool). In the case of allergies, the immune system responds to harmless constructs such as pollen or cat dander as though it were a lethal invader, perhaps because the immune system was never allowed to see enough of either during its formative years, and thus learn that allergens are to be tolerated rather than trounced.
There is an entire second level of allergy based on three-dimensional molecular shapes of allergens and one's own histocompatibility antigens, which may account for why some immune systems overreact to allergens, but would also defeat [your point], which I believe is to tilt at nurture, not nature.
M J Temple O. Carm., Ph.D.

The title is a reference to; not as you might fear ‘A Psalm of Life’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow*---“Lives of great men all remind us / We can make our lives sublime, / And, departing, leave behind us / Footprints on the sands of time” which is just total sycophantic crap; but instead refers to the delightful if anonymous ‘A Strike Among the Poets’---“Lives of great men all remind us / We can make as much as they”.
In fact Strike is so good I’ll give you all of it, and the apparatus to enable the more poetically challenged among you to fully savour it:

* Not to be confused with Henry Wordsworth Tallchap

¹ "libbyscooterism...**" See the supposed etymology of side-burns

² "bloody... " and for once I'm not using 'bloody' as a bloody swear-word!

³ “...little gratin and less leek”: actually in the quaint ways of that time Jonson really wrote that it “had’st small Gratine and lesse Leeke” but who remembers that or (after all this time) cares.
If you are the sort of person who does care about such minutiæ this, though it has absolutely nothing at all to do with my quotation, may be of interest.

** Ahh! Time goes by, and by and by everyone will have forgotten 'Scooter' Libby The lucky bastards!

¹ “The US public holds about 230,000,000–280,000,000 guns—at least one out of every three guns in the world, and nearly one gun per person in the United States” according to the Small Arms Survey’s Occasional Paper No. 19 (Pdf 1.7 MB) A Guide to the US Small Arms Market, Industry, and Exports, 1998–2004, by Tamar Gabelnick, Maria Haug, and Lora Lumpe, September 2006. Page 77

² According to the CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control website

Year	Fatal	Non-fatal	Population
2004	29,569	64,389	293,656,842
2003	30,136	65,834	290,850,005
2002	30,242	58,841	287,984,799

For your delectation here is a whole page of cartoons that never made it into the essay.

And---Wow! Here comes fame! Can fortune be far behind?*

¹ And, as I didn’t just hint, there is a third category (or perhaps it’s separate species, or maybe just a detail of the Sequence), ‘The Emergence Frame’: almost always just two fish one of whom is getting leggy and taking to the land; the other not, either by inclination or merely by representing an earlier temporal state.

² with a quotation from the “1922 Daily Ardmoreite (Ardmore, Okla.) 6 Jan. 10/4---He calls us ‘lounge lizards, tea drinkers, *cake eaters and all that’.”

³ Here is an interesting article on the Scopes trial where I found some of my cartoons.

___________________________

*  Of course it can! Hmpf!!

The title is a reference to the first line of T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding --and yes I have read more of the Four Quartets than that.

¹ “...dropped another load” of snow! What else would it be?

² “...tardigrade” slow moving---it’s in the Dictionary!

³ “...tardivernal” appertaining to a slow spring---it’s not in the Dictionary!

⁴ “...inverted” and squared of course.

¹ The Lady of Shalott

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro' the field the road runs by
To many-tower'd Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.

² "...a town on a railway line in South East England" though I suspect that I really got the idea passing Peckham Rye Station in south-east London.

³ "... Snuffling ‘Thad's Shalott!'” My last line is, of course, a reference to the paronomasic reworking of the phrase, indicative of completion, “That’s the (or your) lot” which meme often has the supposedly humorous “as the man said when he saw the onion” appended and for which no reference can I find.