The Mystery of the Sheep Tick

A poem in the modern style by the Right Rev. Guthrie Tittwhistle.

Ah, dread fundament that I gazed into slack jawed in terror,
My Witherington Acme Eye Piece clamped in my eye,
Lord Archer lay before me prostrate on a French couch,
crouched with derriere (like a supplicant), rearing heavenwards.

‘No man save Doctor or Priest shall see my withers’ quoth he,
‘and that Doctor has a hint of the Spaniard around him’
Thus I found myself, feeble old man that I am,
Investigating Lord Archer’s case of chronic piles.

I shouted my findings rearward, so to speak,
And, through the oak panelled door
(such revealed anus, the room had never witnessed before)
mumbled the good, but swarthy, Doctor Stuart instruction.

‘Ye Gods’*, I muttered, as the full furnace of his last meal blasted forth,
Shuddering I pushed aside great divots of wiry ginger hair,
My trembling hand lightly squeezed by his stout, leathery thighs,
To gaze, like a pilgrim at the end of his travels, at his besmirched whole.

And, grotesque, and not of gods world,
I saw the root of the pain Lord Archer had lamented of,
when he rode his horse, servants or the stone wall he was,
on occasion, proud to sit on and survey his great tracts.

A tick, a vile insect of hideous proportions,
Peeped out from the fringe of his manky hair,
Teetering as it did on the edge of a dirty well,
Perhaps, like a crone, supping a little in thought from a cup.

Not piles then but of natures kingdom,
Was the source of Lord Archers great pain,
And with the aid of salt and burning torch – with great screaming,
I destroyed that vile insect in a veritable conflagration of burning.

Months later I heard from the village Major,
(a florid faced man most fond of plums),
That the sheep, on the high moor, were found much distressed,
And I wonder? Happen that tick by chance or by mischief?

*In many of his writing Tittwhistle uses expressions such as ‘Ye Gods’ and ‘ by Shubniggnarath, black goat of the woods with a thousand young’ which has suggested to many latter day scholars that his belief in a single God was perhaps not as strong as his title of reverend would suggest.