In Dance of Death, Gone Jackal quotes a translation of Goethe's "Totentanz", wherein Goethe sings of "ghostly pale fetters and tatters". And that reminded me of this, a snippet of doggerel composed by a very strange child in Jack Vance's novel Ecce and Old Earth. I'll skip the stump speech about what a very Great Man Jack Vance is.

He had swindled them all with the lead doubloons
He had found in fictitious caves.
Now he's gone to the World of the Nineteen Moons
Where, out on the desert of Standing Stones,
He plunders the sacred graves.