The Metamorphosis of Oscar Mott

A tragic vice of Oscar Mott's Was eating earth from flower pots. It was his chief delight to sup On beaded bits that worms push up. In vain his parents tried to foil This eager appetite for soil. They offered him, in early days, A sailboat if he'd mend his ways, If he would more discreetly dine, A wristwatch, at the age of nine. In vain they gave him castor oil: His tastes were rooted in the soil. One day he swallowed in his greed An energetic maple seed. It slithered down his gastric tract To find his duodenum packed With that horrendous earthy fare; And so it stopped, and rooted there. Now hear how Oscar roars and bawls As roots grow through his stomach walls Observe with care his hectic shiver As tendrils fondly grasp his liver; And listen to him howl and whine As fibers twine about his spine.

A Moral Disquisition

He would have pined away, indeed, If it were not amaple seed. He stood awhile in thought one day; But when he tried to go to play, He found, to his intense despair That he was firmly rooted there. That very evening, after dark, His skin turned slowly into bark. So, in the morning, one could see Nothing of Oscar but a tree. His weeping father said, "A son Who might have been an Edison, "Or (who can tell?) a Rudyard Kipling, Is now a sapling, not a stripling."