When I was a child, my mom used to read poetry to us, especially from an orange book that had been a sixth grade school book published in 1927. My sister took it when her son was young and read to him from it; I “inherited” it when my children were young. (My daughter has called dibs on it.) We have no idea where Mom got it. It was published and used in schools before she was born.
When my mother was in rehab (and later comfort care) after her stroke, I took the book with me when I visited her. I read to her from it. Even when she was “out of it” while I read, she would mouth along the words with me. And later, when she was more alert, I showed her the book and she got very excited. “We used to read that together.” So I read it to her again.
The problem was that most of the poems she would read to us were really depressing. If they weren’t depressing, they had a gruesome slant. I never realized just how much until I was trying to be sensitive to her condition. And yet these are what she read to us when we were children.
Joyce Kilmer’s “The House With Nobody In It” isn’t too bad. Neither is “The Pirate Don Durk of Dowdee,” and “A Nautical Ballad” was turned into a rollicking children’s song, but these are few and far between.
Examples of poems I was hesitant to read to a dying woman:
- “The Wreck of the Hesperus” (a sea captain whose arrogance results in his young daughter’s death)
- “The Spider and the Fly” (entrapment and murder–although it’s supposed to be allegorical)
- “The Yarn of the Nancy Bell” (Cannibalism)
- “The Village Blacksmith” (mourns his dead wife)
- “The Duel” (toys fight until their deaths)
- “Strictly Germ-Proof” (everyone should be the same and if you’re different, we’ll operate on you to “fix” you.)
Yes. This was the poetry of my youth. And my children’s youth. We aren’t any worse off for it, but I just felt weird reading some of these to my dying mother.
