It is a traditionally slim volume of illustrated verses. The drawings are quaintly Victorian in atmosphere; the verse is conventional in rhyme and meter. And the book as a whole is just about as comfortingly familiar as the latest word (if one could hear it) from a bacteriological warfare laboratory.
Paul Dehn, who wrote the verses, is an established British poet, a movie critic for the London Daily Herald, and the co-author of Seven Days to Noon. Edward Gorey, the illustrator, has published several pictorial books, the best known here being The Hapless Child.
Quake, Quake, Quake is divided into several sections: “A Leaden Treasury of English Verse”; “Rhymes for a Modern Nursery”; “Weather Forecast”; “From a Soviet Child’s Garden of Verses”; “From a Modern Student’s Song Book”; and “From a Modern Hymnal.”
O nuclear wind when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I had my arms again.
Rock of ages cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee.
While the bombers thunder past,
Shelter me from burn and blast;
And though I know all men are brothers
Let the fallout fall on others.
My wife and I worked all alone
In a little lab we called our own.
Six months saw our project flower
And we sold the results to a foreign power.
Ha, ha, ha! He, he, he!
Little brown bug, don’t I love thee?
Home they brought her warrior dead:
She could neither weep nor pray,
For that same bomb from which he bled
Had killed her ninety miles away.
Two blind mice,
See how they run!
They each ran out of the lab with an oath,
For a small gamma ray had been aimed at them both.
Did you ever see such a neat little growth
On two blind mice?
Weather forecasts:
Rain before seven,
Dead before eleven.
A red sky at night
Means it went off all right
Quake, quake, quake
On the cold gray course, O Man.
Eager to do for others
The service we did for Japan.
O hell to the armament race
For the bomb that is better and bigger!
O hell to the thumb on the switch
And the finger touching the trigger.
The Christian scientists fire
Their satellites over the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish’d Hand
And the sound of a Voice that is still.
Quake, quake, quake
On thy cold gray course, O Man,
Seeking to end the world so soon
After it just began.
Ring-a-ring o’ neutrons,
A pocket full of positrons,
A fission! A fission!
We all fall down.