I had a hippopotamus; I kept him in a shed
And fed him upon vitamins and vegetable bread;
I made him my companion on many cheery walks
And had his portrait done by a celebrity in chalks.
His charming eccentricities were known on every side,
The creature’s popularity was wonderfully wide:
He frolicked with the Rector in a dozen friendly tussles
Who could not but remark upon his hippopotamuscles.
If he should be afflicted by depression or the dumps,
By hippopotameasles or the hippopotamumps,
I never knew a particle of peace till it was plain
He was hippopotamasticating properly again.
I had a hippopotamus: I loved him as a friend;
But beautiful relationships are bound to have an end.
Time takes, alas, our joys from us and robs us of our blisses;
My hippopotamus turned out a hippopotamissis.
My housekeeper regarded him with jaundice in her eye;
She did not want a colony of hippopotami.
She borrowed a machine gun from her soldier nephew, Percy,
And showed my hippopotamus no hippopotamercy.
My house now lacks the glamour that the charming creature gave,
The garage where I kept him is as silent as the grave:
No longer he displays among the motor tyres and spanners
His hippopotamastery of hippopotamanners.
No longer now he gambols in the orchard in the Spring,
No longer do I lead him through the village on a string;
No longer in the morning does the neighbourhood rejoice
To his hippopotamuscially-modulated voice.
I had a hippopotamus; but nothing upon earth
Is constant in its happiness or lasting in its mirth;
No joy that life can give me can be strong enough to smother
My sorrow for that might-have-been-a-hippopotamother.