Blake's Tyger

From my novella BAUMHOLDER 1961:

Sullivan disliked sentiment and sloppy thinking and

sometimes performed a routine that demonstrated as

much. With a few drinks in him, he was known to recite a

portion of a poem by William Blake to much delight and

hoopla from his inebriated colleagues: “Tiger, tiger,

burning bright,” Sullivan would begin, his blonde hair

short but long enough to comb, which really meant long

enough to look uncombed because Sullivan always had the

shaggy look of an absent-minded professor, and as he

began the poem, his hand would sweep the hair from his

forehead in a theatrical gesture, “in the forests of the night,

what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful

symmetry?” Here Sullivan would look positively baffled by

the question, as if it had cosmic significance. “What the

hammer?” he asked next. “What the chain? In what

furnace was thy brain? What the anvil?” – and at this

precise moment Sullivan would scrunch his ruddy face into

an expression of speechless horror and bewilderment, as if

the questions were too great for the contemplation of mere

mortals, hanging in the air like painful reminders of

human ignorance and insignificance – and after holding

the moment for all it was worth, and perhaps making yet

another theatrical sweep of his hand to brush hair from his

forehead, Sullivan would shout with an exuberance that

never failed to set the first-time listener aback, “What the

fuck!? WHAT THE FUCK!?”