tags: Rebecca, Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably, Hilaire Belloc, poetry, National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day, every day this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me). My poetry suggestions are starting to run dry, which means I can start posting my own favorites (but you've seen many of those already) or you can send me your favorite poems, which I probably haven't read before! Today's poem was suggested by one of my readers, Biosparite.
Rebecca, Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably
A Trick that everyone abhors
In Little Girls is slamming Doors.
A Wealthy Banker's little Daughter
Who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater
(By name Rebecca Offendort),
Was given to this Furious Sport.
She would deliberately go
And Slam the door like Billy-Ho!
To make her Uncle Jacob start.
She was not really bad at heart,
But only rather rude and wild:
She was an aggravating child.
It happened that a Marble Bust
Of Abraham was standing just
Above the Door this little Lamb
Had carefully prepared to Slam,
And down it came! It knocked her flat!
It laid her out! She looked like that:
Her funeral Sermon (which was long
And followed by a Sacred Song)
Mentioned her Virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her Vices too,
And showed the Dreadful End of One
Who goes and slams the door for Fun.
-- Hilaire Belloc, Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Verses (Templegate Pub; Miniature edition; 1998).
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Although Hilaire Belloc was a man of letters and a Catholic apologist, I remember him mostly for Martin Gardner's Fads & Fallacies, where Belloc is featured as a hectoring anti-evolutionist who tried to put H. G. Wells in his place for espousing a naturalism that left no room for God. We still remember Wells, but Belloc is known to only a few.
I'll forgive Belloc a lot for his ability to write verse like this.
Pippa Bacca also perished miserably and, for a minute, the names mashed together in my head (as things often do) and I thought this article was going to be about her.
Strewwel Peter and Co.
Could this have been one of Edward Gorey's inspirations?
Belloc was a brilliant versifier, and when I was small I liked a lot of his verse.
He was rather anti-science though. This was one of his (many) curmudgeonly attitudes:
THE MICROBE is so very small
You cannot make him out at all,
But many sanguine people hope
To see him through a microscope.
His jointed tongue that lies beneath
A hundred curious rows of teeth;
His seven tufted tails with lots
Of lovely pink and purple spots,
On each of which a pattern stands,
Composed of forty separate bands;
His eyebrows of a tender green;
All these have never yet been seen--
But Scientists, who ought to know,
Assure us that is must be so...
Oh! let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!