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1890s Humor Insects Poem

The Artful Ant

The Artful Ant

By Oliver Herford
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
OIiver Herford. [Headpiece for Herford’s poem “The Artful Ant” as it appeared in 1891 in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas, vol. XVIII, no. 4.] Drawing, 1891, Harvard Art Museums.
Once on a time an artful Ant 
    Resolved to give a ball, 
For tho’ in stature she was scant, 
    She was not what you'd call 
A shy or bashful little Ant. 
    (She was not shy at all.)

She sent her invitations through 
    The forest far and wide, 
To all the Birds and Beasts she knew, 
    And many more beside. 
(“You never know what you can do,” 
    Said she, “until you 've tried.”)

Five-score acceptances came in 
    Faster than she could read. 
Said she: “Dear me! I’d best begin
    To stir myself indeed!”
(A pretty pickle she was in, 
    With five-score guests to feed!) 

The artful Ant sat up all night, 
    A-thinking o’er and o’er, 
How she could make from nothing, quite 
    Enough to feed five-score. 
(Between ourselves I think she might 
    Have thought of that before.) 

She thought, and thought, and thought all night,
    And all the following day,
Till suddenly she struck a bright
    Idea, which was— (but say!
Just what it was I am not quite
    At liberty to say.)

Enough, that when the festal day
    Came round, the Ant was seen
To smile in a peculiar way,
    As if— (but you may glean
From seeing tragic actors play
    The kind of smile I mean.)

From here and there and everywhere
    The happy creatures came,
The Fish alone could not be there.
    (And they were not to blame.
“They really could not stand the air,
    But thanked her just the same.”)

The lion, bowing very low,
    Said to the Ant: “I ne’er
Since Noah’s Ark remember so
    Delightful an affair.”
(A pretty compliment, although
    He really wasn’t there.)

They danced, and danced, and danced, and danced;
    It was a jolly sight!
They pranced, and pranced, and pranced, and pranced,
    Till it was nearly light!
And then their thoughts to supper chanced
    To turn. (As well they might!)

Then said the Ant: “It’s only right 
    That supper should begin, 
And if you will be so polite, 
    Pray take each other in.”
(The emphasis was very slight, 
But rested on “Take in.”) 

They needed not a second call, 
    They took the hint. Oh, —yes, 
The largest guest “took in” the small, 
    The small “took in” the less, 
The less “took in” the least of all. 
    (It was a great success!)

As for the rest—but why spin out 
    This narrative of woe?— 
The Lion took them in about 
    As fast as they could go. 
(And went home looking very stout, 
    And walking very slow.) 

And when the Ant, not long ago, 
    Lost to all sense of shame, 
Tried it again, I chance to know 
    That not one answer came. 
(Save from the Fish, who “could not go, 
But thanked her all the same.”)
Antoine-Louis Barye. Lion Sleeping. Watercolor on wove paper, lined, 1810-75, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.
HERFORD, OLIVER. “THE ARTFUL ANT,” IN ARTFUL ANTICKS, 4-9. NEW YORK: THE CENTURY CO., 1897.
Contexts

In a Life Magazine issue from November 1894, editor Robert Bridges noted that, in Artful Anticks, “when [Oliver Herford] makes rhymes about a kitten, a dormouse, a spider, or a crocodile, you are absolutely certain that he has put himself on such friendly terms with each animal that he is not only able to reveal the quirks of its mind, but draw a picture of them. That is why grown folks will get as much fun out of this book as children.”

Herford was a well-known poet, humorist writer, and illustrator.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

artful: Skilfully adapted for the accomplishment of a purpose; ingenious, clever. Hence: cunning, crafty, deceitful.

festal: Characteristic of a feast; (hence also) joyous or celebratory in tone; (of a person or group) in a festive or holiday mood.

five-score: Rarely used for “a hundred” (from Shakespeare).

Resources for Further Study
  • Read more poems by Oliver Herford in All Poetry.
  • Reusable Art features a growing collection of Oliver Herford’s illustrations

Categories
1890s Flowers Humor

The Professor and the White Violet

The Professor and the White Violet

By Oliver Herford
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
Isaac Sprague. Sweet White Violet. Lithograph, ca. 1876-1882, Digital Commonwealth. Public Domain. 
THE PROFESSOR.
    Tell me, little violet white, 
    If you will be so polite,
    Tell me how it came that you 
    Lost your pretty purple hue?[1] 
Were you blanched with sudden fears? 
Were you bleached with fairies’ tears?
    Or was Dame Nature out of blue, 
    Violet, when she came to you? 

THE VIOLET.
    Tell me, silly mortal, first, 
    Ere I satisfy your thirst 
    For the truth concerning me ¬— 
    Why you are not like a tree? 
Tell me why you move around, 
Trying different kinds of ground, 
With your funny legs and boots 
In the place of proper roots?
 
    Tell me, mortal, why your head, 
    Where green branches ought to spread, 
    Is as shiny smooth as glass,
    With just a fringe of frosty grass? 
Tell me—Why, he’s gone away! 
Wonder why he wouldn’t stay? 
Can he be—well, I declare! — 
Sensitive about his hair?
Original illustration by Oliver Herford from Artful Anticks, p. 58.
HERFORD, OLIVER. “THE PROFESSOR AND THE WHITE VIOLET,” IN ARTFUL ANTICKS, 58-9. NEW YORK: THE CENTURY CO., 1894.

[1] The viola blanda, also known as sweet white violet, is a perennial plant native to North America.

Contexts

In a Life Magazine issue from November 1894, editor Robert Bridges noted that, in Artful Anticks, “when [Oliver Herford] makes rhymes about a kitten, a dormouse, a spider, or a crocodile, you are absolutely certain that he has put himself on such friendly terms with each animal that he is not only able to reveal the quirks of its mind, but draw a picture of them. That is why grown folks will get as much fun out of this book as children.”

Herford was a well-known poet, humorist writer, and illustrator.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

ere: Before, formerly, at a former time.

Resources for Further Study
  • Read more poems by Oliver Herford in All Poetry.
  • Reusable Art features a growing collection of Oliver Herford’s illustrations.

Categories
1890s Humor Outdoors Poem Wild animals

An Arctic Hare

An Arctic Hare

By Oliver Herford
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Oliver Herford, “An Arctic Hare.” Original print accompanying the poem.
An Arc-tic Hare we now be-hold.
The hair, you will ob-serve, is white;[1]
But if you think the Hare is old,
You will be ver-y far from right.
The Hare is young, and yet the hair
Grew white in but a sin-gle night.
When, then it must have been a scare
That turned this Hare. No; ’twas not fright
(Al-though such cases are well known);
I fear that once a-gain you’re wrong.
Know then, that in the Arc-tic Zone
A sin-gle night is six months long.[2]
Herford, Oliver. “An Arctic Hare.” A Child’s Primer of Natural History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899.

[1] Arctic hares live in Alaska, northern Canada, and parts of Greenland. They have large rear feet like snowshoes, and their coats turn white in the winter to help them evade predators. Those animals that live in the northernmost part of the species’ range remain white all year.

[2] In the Arctic the sun disappears beneath the horizon for several months, but most places in the zone have a twilight that lasts for many hours. See Rao in Resources.

Contexts

When Herford published his book, natural history was an obsessive subject for children’s writers. Popular magazines like St. Nicholas led the way, creating study groups like the St. Nicholas League and advocacy for bird protection through its Bird Defenders. Exotic or unfamiliar animals seemed to particularly fascinate American children. Contributors to St. Nick included prominent scientists like William T. Hornaday, who became the director of the New York Zoological Park (commonly known as the Bronx Zoo), and who founded the National Zoo in Washington, DC; famous naturalist John Burroughs; and Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Boy Scouts of America.

Herford’s poems, as well as their accompanying images, presented more fanciful accounts of animals but sometimes offered short natural history lessons. In this case, Herford foregrounds the hares’ native habitat, with its very short winter nights (although he exaggerates the duration of darkness). All the poems in this book hyphenate some words, presumably to instruct children—and their parents—how to read.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

The video “Arctic Hare” (by Wildlife All About) shows the hares in their natural habitat and gives information about the animals’ characteristics, behaviors, and challenges.

The WWF (World Wildlife Fund) has a symbolic adoption program that helps raise funds to protect the arctic hare.

Categories
1890s Humor Outdoors Wild animals

The Sloth

The Sloth

By Oliver Herford
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Oliver Herford, “The Sloth.” Original print accompanying the poem.
The Sloth en-joys a life of Ease;[1]
He hangs in-vert-ed from the trees,
	And views life up-side down.
If you, my child, are noth-ing loath
To live in In-dol-ence and Sloth,
	Un-heed-ing the World’s frown,
You, too, un-vexed by Toil and Strife,
May take a hu-mor-ous view of life.
Herford, Oliver. “The Sloth.” A Child’s Primer of Natural History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899.

[1] Sloths are tree-dwelling animals from Central and South America. They are the slowest moving animals on Earth.

Contexts

When Herford published his book, natural history was an obsessive subject for children’s writers. Popular magazines like St. Nicholas led the way, creating study groups like the St. Nicholas League and advocacy for bird protection through its Bird Defenders. Exotic animals seemed to particularly fascinate American children. Contributors to St. Nick included prominent scientists like William T. Hornaday, who became the director of the New York Zoological Park (commonly known as the Bronx Zoo), and who founded the National Zoo in Washington, DC; famous naturalist John Burroughs; and Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Boy Scouts of America.

Herford’s poems, as well as their accompanying images, presented more fanciful accounts of animals but sometimes offered short natural history lessons. In this case, Herford emphasizes sloths’ upside-down lifestyle. All the poems in this book hyphenate some words, presumably to instruct children—and their parents—how to read.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary

inverted: reversed; contrary to expectation

indolence: love of ease; laziness

unvexed: not worried; undistressed

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

“10 incredible facts about the sloth.” BBC Radio 4. Includes such facts as why we need sloths to have avocados.

“The Extreme Life of a Sloth.” Science Insider. This short video has fascinating facts about the animal, including why it travels from trees to the ground only once a week.

Categories
1890s Humor Poem Wild animals

The Giraffe

The Giraffe

By Oliver Herford
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Oliver Herford, “The Giraffe.” Original print accompanying the poem.
See the Gi-raffe; he is so tall
There is not room to get him all
U-pon the page. His head is high-er—
The pic-ture proves it—than the Spire.[1]
That’s why the na-tives,[2] when they race
To catch him, call it stee-ple-chase.[3]
His chief de-light it is to set
A good example: shine or wet
He rises ere the break of day,
And starts his break-fast right away.
His food has such a way to go,—
His throat’s so very long,—and so
An early break-fast he must munch
To get it down ere time for lunch.
Herford, Oliver. “The Giraffe.” A Child’s Primer of Natural History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899.

[1] Their steeples made churches the tallest buildings in most U.S. towns and many cities.

[2] Giraffes are native to the grasslands and open woodlands of Africa. See Contexts and Resources below for more detail.

[3] A steeplechase is a horse race across country with jumps and other obstacles, but Herford imagines the giraffe as a steeple.

Contexts

The late nineteenth century began the period known as The New Imperialism, in which Western European nations took control, and used the resources, of nearly the whole continent. This poem’s speaker distinguishes his European perspective by using the word “native.”

When Herford published his book, natural history was an obsessive subject for children’s writers. Popular magazines like St. Nicholas led the way, creating study groups like the St. Nicholas League and advocacy for bird protection through its Bird Defenders. Exotic animals seemed to particularly fascinate American children. Contributors to St. Nick included prominent scientists like William T. Hornaday, who became the director of the New York Zoological Park (commonly known as the Bronx Zoo), and who founded the National Zoo in Washington, DC; famous naturalist John Burroughs; and Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Boy Scouts of America.

Herford’s poems, as well as their accompanying images, presented more fanciful accounts of animals but sometimes offered small natural history lessons. In this case, Herford underscores the time it takes giraffes to swallow and digest food and water. All the poems in this book hyphenate some words, presumably to instruct children—and their parents—how to read.

Resources for Further Study
  • “Giraffe, Giraffa camelopardalis.” San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
  • “Giraffe Fact Sheet.” PBS Nature. July 15, 2020.
  • Kilcup, Karen L. Stronger, Truer, Bolder: American Children’s Writing, Nature, and the Environment. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. See chapter 4, esp. 271-74, for information about the St. Nicolas contributors mentioned above.
Contemporary Connections

The American Wildlife Foundation and The Nature Conservancy outline current challenges to giraffe habitat and proposes some solutions.

The National Geographic Society’s video “Giraffes 101” includes some surprising facts about the animal.

Categories
1940s African American Humor Insects Outdoors Poem

In the Grass

In the Grass

By Effie Lee Newsome
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Original 1940 woodcut for “In the Grass,”
by Lois Mailou Jones. Public Domain.
Sometimes I lie in meadow grass,
And watch all kinds of insect pass
In brown and red and gray.
Some very busy ants speed by
With white crumb bundles stacked up high,
All hastening one way.

Each hurries with his heavy load 
Up what I call the Cricket Road,
It looks so cool and dark.
There’s pleasant millet growing there,[1]
And wisps of fox-grass everywhere[2]
That I use as a cane

To push along some lazy bug,
That lags without a load to lug
Along the insect land.
And bugs keep coming on and on—
New bands before the old have gone.
Sometimes one comes alone. 

A grasshopper quick, proud and lean
Leaps to the millet, tall and green,
And takes it for this throne. 
Sometimes a beetle blunders past
Or stops awhile, then starts out, fast,
As though he’d heard a call.

Sometimes a soft green worm drags by,
Then winds beneath a millet sky,
And can’t be seen at all.
Each worm and bug moves on its way.
Some tap the grass, as though in play.
But I like best the ants’ long strong
Returning from their marketing.
Newsome, Effie Lee. “In the Grass.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 9-10.

[1] Millet is an ancient type of grass often grown for its grain. Newsome imagines herself down in the grass with the insects, so the millet seems like a forest.

[2] Foxtail grasses, considered a weed, can reach as much as three feet tall. The seeds are dangerous for livestock to eat.

Contexts

Newsome worked among the many celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anne Spencer, many of them poets. Among her noteworthy contributions to that movement was her writing and editing for W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). As John Claborn points out, Du Bois’s political goals embraced the idea of access to natural spaces, and the magazine featured environmental writing by such notable authors as Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and Hughes. Newsome contributed to and edited “The Little Page” (“Whimsies for the Younger Folk”), where much of her work emphasized nature. This poem, like many others in The Envious Lobster, whimsically enacts a natural history lesson, while it encourages children’s imagination.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

Anonymous. Reading of Newsome’s poem, “The Bronze Legacy.” The illustrations for Gladiola Garden were done by prominent Black artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998).

Johnston, Amber O’Neal. “African American Poetry: Effie Lee Newsome. Heritage Mom blog.

Categories
1880s Education Farm life Humor Native American Poem

Mary’s Goat

Mary’s Goat

By Anonymous
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
The Goat. Colored engraving. Compte de Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, c. 1749.
Mary had a William goat,[1]
	And he was black as jet;
He followed Mary round all day,
	And liked her? you just bet!

He went with her to school one day;
	The teacher kicked him out;
It made the children grin, you know,
	To have that goat about.

But though old Whack’em kicked him out,
	Yet still he lingered near;
He waited just outside the door
	Till Whack’em did appear.

Then William ran to meet the man—
	He ran his level best;
He met him just behind, you know—
	Down just below the vest.

Old Whack’em turned a summersault;[2]
	The goat stood on his head,
And Mary laughed herself so sick
	She had to go to bed.
Anonymous. “Mary’s Goat.” The Youth’s Companion 19, no. 2 (December 1882): 196.

[1] A male goat. The author plays with the common term “billy goat.”

[2] A somersault.

Contexts

Begun in 1881, The Youth’s Companion—a name that many nineteenth-century publications shared—was a monthly student magazine that published articles written by pupils of the Catholic-run boarding school located on the Tulalip Indian Reservation. A federally recognized tribe located in the mid-Puget Sound area, the Tulalip Tribes received reservation lands—22,000 acres—in 1855, with its legal boundaries established by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1873. According to the Tulalip Tribes website, “it was created to provide a permanent home for the Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Skagit, Suiattle, Samish, and Stillaguamish Tribes and allied bands living in the region.”

Nineteenth-century Indian boarding schools aimed to assimilate Native Americans into white culture. They separated children from their families, required students to dress like white Americans, and prohibited them from speaking their language. They also emphasized so-called “industrial” training: boys learned agricultural and industrial skills, while girls learned how to cook, sew, and clean a household. Students were often expected to become servants or to provide manual labor help for whites.

Like many contributions to Native American student periodicals, this poem was published anonymously. Students living on reservations during this time often received educations governed by white religious authorities who emphasized moral training. Here the author eludes a moral by parodying “Mary’s Lamb,” which was a popular nineteenth-century endeavor. This form also enables the author to indirectly criticize—and imaginatively injure—someone who punished students regularly and without cause: “old Whack’em.”

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

“Tulalip History Minute 04—The Tulalip Indian School presented by Mary Jane Topash,” the Tulalip History Project. Provides Tulalip-sponsored background on the tribe.

“Editorial: Getting to the truth of Tulalip boarding school,” September 26, 2021, HeraldNet (Everett, Washington). Caution: includes information about abuses at the school.

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