[640] Fairies

A followup of sorts to the recent Dorothy Parker poem...

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).
    --  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

From: Abraham Thomas <Thomas@>

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, http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/index.html