In Pickle + 

The journals say that the embalming done + 

To Garfield’s body badly was begun, + 

Faultily finished all too soon⁠—in short + 

Was of a most unsatisfactory sort. + 

Unsatisfactory? How so? To whom? + 

Has the long sullen silence of the tomb + 

At last been broken? Is rebellion’s head + 

Reared in the subject province of the dead? + 

Unsatisfactory, forsooth! Who’d wish + 

To satisfy, in salting it, a fish? + 

With spices when the conscious cook supplies + 

The autumnal mince-meat for the winter pies + 

He makes no question if the meat prefer + 

Clove, cinnamon or pepper, sage or myrrh. + 

“There was,” says Chowder if a clam upbraid, + 

“No thought of pleasing thee when I was made.” + 

What! shall the dead with impudence complain + 

Of how we’ve potted each inert remain?⁠— + 

The pickle criticise and even condemn, + 

As if the purpose were to pleasure them? + 

Their cure they rightly canvass in disease; + 

We’ll cure them after in what way we please. + 

With blazing eulogies in crowded halls, + 

And mourning emblems blackening the walls; + 

With gorgeous funerals, both at the spot + 

Where you were buried and where you were not⁠— + 

A dummy funeral’s inutile show + 

Fifty to manifest a dummy woe; + 

With black-ruled journals, selling all at twice + 

The customary uneventful price; + 

With guarded tomb and monument as fine + 

As any light-house on the ocean line⁠— + 

Garfield, if still you are dissatisfied + 

You might as profitably not have died. + 

So you’re complaining⁠—vive la bagatelle! + 

The brine, no doubt, was weak, and cheap as well, + 

Got for a song an undertaker sang + 

(We paid him for it through the nose⁠—the pang + 

More keen than all our sorrow.) Even so, + 

Your bones that served us for a public show + 

Outlast already our unsalted woe. + 