A Half Dozen Alternate Takes in Rhyme...

     ...on Burton & Wodehouse, Ryder Haggard & Shakespeare

 

Woodcutter Baba joins two score of thieves;

Wooster sacks gentleman's gentleman Jeeves.

"She" isn't someone who must be obey'd...

and John Falstaff drinks only pink lemonade.

     ...on Defoe & Zinn, Chaucer & Jackson

Robinson Crusoe goes down with the ship;

Columbus gets seasick so cancels his trip.

Alys, a Bath bride, is giving up men...

and never will Destry ride -- ever again.

     ...on Melville & de Troyes, Seuss & Seurat

 

Ahab retires after killing the whale;

Lancelot pauses his search for the Grail.
"Does anyone still wear a hat...?" asks the Cat...

and Sundays, gendarmes close the Ile de Grande Jatte. 

    ...on Joyce & Proust, Cervantes and Fitzgerald

 

Bloom calls in sick on the 16th of June;

Swann sees his therapist each afternoon.
Quixote's dyslexic -- the Don cannot read...

and Gatsby leaves all to his neighbors in need.

     ...on Shakespeare & Rousseau, Twain & Conan Doyle

 

Hamlet, in monologue: "Credit no ghost";

Marie Antoinette counters, "Let 'em eat toast!"

Huck, in the end, elects not to "light out"...

and Holmes fails to learn what that hound's all about.

     ...on Defoe & Zinn, Homer & Vergil 

Friday and friends devour Robinson C;

Grant gets his clock clean'd by Robert E. Lee.

Odysseus determines to ne'er return home...

and it seems that not ev'ry road leads one to Rome.