I shoot the Hippopotamus With bullets made of platinum, Because if I use leaden ones His hide is sure to flatten 'em.
Hilaire Belloc, "The Hippopotamus", The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896).
Parody: American women shoot the hippopotamus with eyebrows made of platinum.
E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest (1936), 'Mickey and Minnie'.
Did you ever see the Rhinoceros, and the Hippopotamus, at the Zoological Gardens, trying to dance a minuet together? It is a touching sight.
Lewis Carroll, A Selection from the Letters of Lewis Carroll to his Child-Friends (1933) edited by Evelyn M. Hatch, Letter to Gaynor Simpson (27 December 1873), p. 91.
He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk Descending from the bus: He looked again, and found it was A Hippopotamus: 'If this should stay to dine,' he said, 'There won't be much for us!'
Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, Chapter 7: The Baron's Embassy
A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake.
Away on the hilltop sat combing her hair His fair Hippopotamine maid. The Hippopotamus was no ignoramus And sang her this sweet serenade:
Mud! Mud! Glorious mud! Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. So, follow me, follow, down to the hollow, And there let us wallow in glorious mud.
There is something about a blurb-writer paying his respects to a funny book which puts one in mind of a short-sighted lord mayor raising his hat to a hippopotamus.
Michael Frayn, Introduction, The Best of Beachcomber.
The muckle hippopotamus spelders in glaur apo’ his kite. A solid fact he seems tae some. They arena right.
The hippo’s coorse digestive tract erodes through frequent emptying. The KIRK’s the only solid fact that winna ding.
Alasdair Gray, 'The Scottish Hippo', a parody of T. S. Eliot (he jokingly claimed this was a lost work by R. Crombie Saunders, but in fact it was his own).
Behold the hippopotamus! We laugh at how he looks to us, And yet in moments dank and grim, I wonder how we look to him.