They threw me from the castle for a kiss behind a door
Two men in blue then bought my lunch and dressed me up for war
They gave me a free choice: twelve balls of lead, or else the rod
Two thousand men, four thousand strokes, a gift, they said, from God
And if this is the best of all worlds that could be
Then what are the others? God help them. God help me
And if this is the finest that ever was planned
I have seen enough of it. I don’t understand
Then Lisbon fell. Then thirty thousand crushed beneath the stone
The sea came up and broke the ships, the pavements overthrown
The University decided, to prevent a second quake
They’d burn a few alive by slow fire. Slowly. For our sake
They burned a man for marrying his godmother, and two
For pushing back the bacon on a chicken. That would do
They hanged my teacher up. Whipped me in cadence to the hymn
And that same day the ground shook worse again. So much for him
And if this is the best of all worlds that could be
Then what are the others? God help them. God help me
And if this is the finest that ever was planned
I have seen enough of it. I don’t understand
A man lay by the road at Surinam. He’d lost a hand
He’d lost a leg as well. He said it’s custom in that land
“A finger in the mill, they take the arm off at the wrist
And running takes the leg. Both cases happened. Both exist
This is the price at which you eat your sugar.” That was all
And I gave up on optimism, sitting by that wall
They asked me what it was, this optimism I had lost
It’s the madness of insisting everything is right
When it is wrong
That’s all it is. That’s all it ever was
We found a land where children played at quoits with lumps of gold
With emeralds and rubies worth a kingdom, we were told
The schoolmaster just flung them down and went about his day
No priests, no jails, no beggars there. And still we walked away
We asked the finest mind in Turkey why the world is so
And why there’s so much evil in it. This is what we know
“King sends a ship to Egypt — does he trouble for the crew
About the comfort of the mice?” We said, “What should we do?”
He said, “Hold your tongue.” And then he shut the door
An old man with his twenty acres hadn’t heard the news
And didn’t care to hear it, and he said he wouldn’t choose
To trouble with the capital. He sends his fruit to sell
His labour keeps off weariness and vice and want as well
And if this is the best of all worlds that could be
Then what are the others? God help them. God help me
And if this is the finest that ever was planned
I have seen enough of it. I don’t understand
And Pangloss said it once again: if you had not been thrown
Out of that castle for the girl, and left to walk alone
To walk across America and lose the golden sands
Of El Dorado and the sheep you carried in your hands
You wouldn’t sit here eating pistachios in the sun
Take one thing out, he says, and then the whole of it’s undone
All that is very well
But we must cultivate our garden