But there was one mercy in it: the words and the music went together in a perfect concord of weak worthlessness; and Hester had not to listen, with the miserable feeling that rude hands were pulling at the modest garments of her soul, to a true poem set to the music of a Scrannel pipe of wretched straw, whose every tone and phrase choked the divine bird caged in the verse.
"Weighed and Wanting"
George MacDonald
When a customer arrives he calls one of his goats, sits down on the nearest doorstep-it may be a seventeenth-century palace-and milks a cupful; and then he is off again, with his Scrannel to his lips, the very type of the urban Strephon.
"A Wanderer in Paris"
E. V. Lucas
They are sped; And, when they list, their lean and flashy songs Grate on their Scrannel pipes of wretched straw; The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 125 But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing said.
"Minor Poems by Milton"
John Milton