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Fairies -- Marchette Gaylord Chute

A followup of sorts to the recent Dorothy Parker poem...
(Poem #640) Fairies
 You can't see fairies unless you're good.
 That's what Nurse said to me.
 They live in the smoke of the chimney,
 Or down in the roots of a tree;
 They brush their wings on a tulip,
 Or hide behind a pea.

 But you can't see fairies unless you're good,
 So they aren't much use to me.
-- Marchette Gaylord Chute
Amidst the plethora of insipid, saccharine or just-plain-dull children's
poems, it was refreshing to come across one as unexpectedly and delightfully
subversive as 'Fairies'.

Of course, there are a lot of brilliant poems out there too, but too many
writers seem to take writing for children as a license to churn out the most
awful dreck. Sturgeon's law apart, I can't help but feel that some writers
take distinct advantage of the fact that their target audience and their
target *market* are entirely separate.

Today's piece is a clear dig at the preachy variety of poem - starting off
with a solemn moral injunction, throwing in a few cliches about fairies, and
then delivering the unrepentant punchline. Took me totally by surprise - I
laughed out loud.

Biography:

 B. 08-16-1909, Marchette Gaylord Chute - UK author. MC broke the retelling
 mode of historical writers and did actual source research. She is best
 known for With Shakespeare of London (1950) and Geoffrey Chaucer of England
 (1946).
    --  [broken link] http://www.undelete.org/woa/woa08-16.html

Links:

The Dorothy Parker poem referred to: poem #638

We've run several children's poems on Minstrels, but nothing particularly
reminiscent of today's.

-martin

8 comments: ( or Leave a comment )

Abraham Thomas said...

Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap". Derived from a quote
by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, "Sure, 90% of
science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." Oddly,
when Sturgeon's Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to
'crap'.
-- The Jargon File, [broken link] http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/index.html

Anonymous said...

wow this is dumb

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