Time hurries along and fair youth flits away,
Like the mist of an April morn
Each year is a way mark and points to decay,
These paths that are rugged and worn.
Full twenty three winters have strengthened my frame
Since first on the dawn of life
I vacantly gazed: Now all sexes exclaim --
Fie Jack! Have you not got a wife?
No! Jack has not yet got a wife.

The year that is past, has him pregnant with change
The future still hovering afar,
Here sceptres are sapping, there princes look strange
At the gloomy approach of war,
Long wed to the Muses -- Companions sublime
I laugh at all gun powder strife
And listened enchained to the rapture of rhyme
In lieu of a termagant wife
Ochone for a rough ginger wife.

Popes, Bishops, and Bulls on our notice are crammed
By laymen and churchmen so fat
Till all that is Roman e'en noses are damned
Along with the Cardinal's hat
"No Poping" thunders from Wigton to McK
Still louder from Oban to Fife
And petticoat preachers harangue till I'm sick
What curse like a bigoted wife?
There's none like an Orthodox wife.

"The Model Republic," exults in her pride
And boasts of refinement and cash
The slavery there gallops rampant and wide
O'er Blackamoore doomed to the lash
But freedom runs hard on the heels of reform
And purgative problems are rife --
A truce with the Bells -- I'm afraid when they storm
I'll stop and look out for a wife
Aye faith! and I must have a wife.