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A Man With No Shirt

Two score and seven years ago--
you may take that to be 47 years ago--
I sat in a library carrel in the middle of the night,
parceling and piecing my dissertation together,
when I read something sane to keep my head
while all those about me were losing theirs.
I memorized it without even intending to:

And I will take off my shirt and tear it,
and make a razzly-dazzly noise,
and the people will look at me and say,
that man is tearing his shirt.

It had been cautiously attributed to Carl Sandburg,
and three things seemed to make that plausible:
"the people", "razzly-dazzly", and the pedestrian response
to an impetuous thing to do.

I might have written more than one chapter
to an undying dissertation while I tried to track down
the source of that quote.  In addition to reading
enough Carl Sandburg to raise me well above
the academic trough in which I had been wallowing,
I thumbed a hundred volumes in which the people
tore their pedestrian shirts, without art.

No luck!

When, a score and more years later--
you may take that to mean the late nineteen-eighties--
I tried to use the computer to search for the words,
I found nothing, still.

This morning, I tried again,
perhaps because I myself am
four score and almost four,
and this cannot go on forever.

I found it!  It was Carl Sandburg who said almost that.
It was not "razzly dazzly", but "ripping razzly",
and as usual Sandburg said it better.

It comes from Smoke and Steel, 1922:

                            III.  Broken-Face Gargoyles

                                             5.  Shirt

             My shirt is a token and symbol,
             more than a cover for sun and rain,
             my shirt is a signal,
             and a teller of souls.

              I can take off my shirt and tear it,
             and so make a ripping razzly noise,
             and the people will say,
             "Look at him tear his shirt."

              I can keep my shirt on.
             I can stick around and sing like a little bird
             and look 'em all in the eye and never be fazed.
                I can keep my shirt on.


 I can scarcely keep my shirt on!
In fact, I do not have a shirt on,
nor much beyond slippers and a robe;
slippers because of scorpions,
and a robe, because.

What a ripping razzly day!
The people might look at me and say,
"That man has no shirt."

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