This week, the American satirist, song-writer and mathematician Tom Lehrer died at the age of 97. To mark his passing, I have chosen “We Will All Go Together When We Go”
You will all go directly to your respective Valhallas
Tom Lehrer (1928—2025)
Go directly, do not pass Go,
Do not collect two hundred dolla’s.
Poem 398. We Will All Go Together When We Go
When you attend a funeral,
It is sad to think that sooner o’
Later those you love will do the same for you.
And you may have thought it tragic,
Not to mention other adjec-
Tives, to think of all the weeping they will do.
But don’t you worry.
No more ashes, no more sackcloth,
And an armband made of black cloth
Will some day never more adorn a sleeve:
For if the bomb that drops on you
Gets your friends and neighbors too,
There’ll be nobody left behind to grieve.
And we will all go together when we go.
What a comforting fact that is to know.
Universal bereavement,
An inspiring achievement,
Yes, we all will go together when we go.
We will all go together when we go.
All suffused with an incandescent glow.
No one will have the endurance
To collect on his insurance,
Lloyd’s of London will be loaded when they go.
Oh, we will all fry together when we fry.
We’ll be french fried potatoes by and by.
There will be no more misery
When the world is our rotisserie,
Yes, we all will fry together when we fry.
Down by the old maelstrom,
There’ll be a storm before the calm.
And we will all bake together when we bake.
There’ll be nobody present at the wake.
With complete participation
In that grand incineration,
Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak.
Oh, we will all char together when we char.
And let there be no moaning of the bar.
Just sing out a Te Deum
When you see that I.C.B.M.,
And the party will be “come as you are”.
Oh, we will all burn together when we burn.
There’ll be no need to stand and wait your turn.
When it’s time for the fallout
And Saint Peter calls us all out,
We’ll just drop our agendas and adjourn.
You will all go directly to your respective Valhallas
Go directly, do not pass Go,
Do not collect two hundred dolla’s.
And we will all go together when we go.
Ev’ry Hottenhot and ev’ry Eskimo.
When the air becomes uranious,
We will all go simultaneous.
Yes, we all will go together
When we all go together,
Yes. we all will go together when we go.
Tom Lehrer wrote many songs in the course of his life: educational songs aimed at elucidating the vagaries of English and gently mocking the abstruse truths of mathematics and the sciences, parodies of love songs in various styles and polemics against war and the nuclear threats of the day. This song belongs in that category.
Lehrer scattered clever rhymes throughout this song in the manner of Ogden Nash and like Nash, he wasn’t averse to inventing words to fit into the rhyme or lengthening the metre when he felt inclined to do so.
He emphasises the terrible nature of Mutually Assured Destruction (appropriately abbreviated to MAD) the Cold War military doctrine that is still applied today, through the continual assertion that “we will all go together when we go.” The song begins by contrasting the sadness we all feel at a funeral and the reminder that we too will be the subject of the obsequies one day. “But don’t you worry” Lehrer says—with MAD and the increasing power of the atomic arsenal, we won’t go one by one but all together and “There’ll be nobody left behind to grieve.”
He mocks this “Universal bereavement” as “An inspiring achievement”—one of the clever rhymes that make this song enjoyable. The next verse is similar but includes the line “All suffused with an incandescent glow” which is brilliant in my view, and it mocks the insurance brokers who won’t have to pay out on their policies since the holders will all be extinct, to say nothing of the brokers themselves.
Striking a macabre note (a common note in his songs), he compares the charred remains of the human race to chips overdone in the fryer and chicken roasted to a cinder on the rotisserie.
At this point, he inserts a burst of “Down by the Old Mill Stream” with his own spin on the lyrics, ingeniously inverting the old maxim that there’s always a calm before a storm to evoke the fire storm of a nuclear apocalypse and the deathly and permanent silence that would follow, which reminds me of “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Sara Teasdale.
Reverting to black humour, he paints a picture of the entire human race as “Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak,” producing another delightful if gloomy rhyming of ‘participation’ with ‘incineration’ and then makes a subtly sardonic reference to Tennyson’s elegiac poem “Crossing the Bar” and then rhyming the Christian hymn of praise “Te Deum” with the acronym “ICBM” (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile). A party that is “come as you are” means wear pretty much what you want—Lehrer is suggesting that the clothes people are wearing will be irrelevant when the fire descends. By the same token, we won’t need to queue up for destruction, it will be wide-spread and general and “We will all burn together when we burn”
This leads to a rhyming of fallout with Saint Peter (the guardian of the gates of Heaven) calling us “all out” and the image of an interrupted business meeting where the participants “drop our agendas and adjourn”: discarding their minutes and notes and putting the meeting on indefinite hold.
The next verse is one of my favourites, mixing Scandinavian mythology with Monopoly and rhyming Valhallas with “two hundred dolla’s”
The final verse reminds us that rather like the Black Death of the 1300s, a nuclear apocalypse has no bar to race: “Ev’ry Hottentot and ev’ry Eskimo” will suffer the same fate—“When the air becomes uranious/We will all go simultaneous” (another great rhyme and an example of Lehrer mimicking Nash’s propensity for inventing words that provide the rhyme while still making sense).
The song finishes with the refrain which recurs throughout: “We all will go together when we go.”
I like this song because it’s a great antidote to the proponents of MAD and nuclear proliferation and demonstrates Lehrer’s talent for rhyme, scansion and satire. You can find this song performed by Lehrer himself on YouTube and I encourage you to watch (or listen to) his other songs which range from the macabre comedy of “The Masochism Tango” through his setting of “The Elements” of the periodic table to the tune of “A Modern Major-General” to satires such as “It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier”.