Sylvia Townsend Warner, The scapegoat, and the Diodorus phallic thimble quatrain

Here’s a devilishly lovely thing, apparently from 1925, of which your man knows the last couplet:

See the scapegoat, happy beast,
From every personal sin released,
And in the desert, hidden apart,
Dancing with a careless heart.

“Lightly weigh the sins of others.”
See him skip! “Am I my brother’s
Keeper? Oh, never, no, no, no!
Lightly come and lightly go!”

In the town, from sin made free,
Righteous men hold jubilee.
In one desert all alone
The scapegoat dances on and on.

The Living Age was not afaik on sale anywhere convenient, and The Spectator was probably off-limits for a multitude of reasons, so perhaps school rather than family was the slow-flowing conduit.

Another scapegoating conundrum from the troublesome 20s, all of which your man was able to recite:

Diodorus Siculus
Made himself ridiculous,
By thinking thimbles
Were phallic symbols.

Bristol was cited, though I suppose this is a possibility, but still: WTF?

Similar posts

• Origins of the “Gaelic Blessing” used at quasi-Christian, pagan and “humanist” funerals, and in a piece by John Rutter
  Transphobic druidic mumbojumbo by William “Fiona” Sharp, in which God answers a prayer and cures a Hebridean fisherman’s feminine gender identity.
• In which the Catalan authorities ask me to do something in Spanish rather than English
  Actually, I’d better not go into the details, but it’s all most curious. Until you recall that the vast majority of
• The Russian folk song in the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona
  I thought it was a recent version of Stravinsky’s Petrushka theme, but it turns out that Pete Seeger is the intermediary.
• Danse macabre
  These three dancing Spidermen (Scripting News): … reminded me of the trio of Batmen in Jan Mohammad’s 1990 Lollywood hunt-the-Salman epic, International
• A judge orders materials at the Barcelona Foreigner Internment Centre to be translated into languages the inmates can’t read
  Judge Joaquín Aguirre has identified a problem: many Senegalese etc can’t speak their national language, French, to a level that would